October 31, 2025
Silos vs Slack: Choose your chaos
How to build silos and decrease collaboration (on purpose)
Internet argues: fences save focus or kill progress?
TLDR: The article argues for strong team boundaries: collaborate inside, minimize between. Commenters spar over whether this boosts focus or blocks progress, with some demanding central teams for complex platforms and others citing regulation or turnover. It matters because too much cross-team noise can stall big projects.
A spicy manifesto just told managers to build silos on purpose—keep teams tight and stop the cross-company group projects—and the crowd lost its mind. Some cheered the “less chatter, more ship” vibe, nodding to Amazon’s hardline API rules; others yelled “this breaks stuff!” and waved caution flags. Commenter softwaredoug split the room with a pragmatic take: silos work when the product is stable, but in fast-changing companies they crumble. Xcelerate chimed in that too many leaders at the same level means nothing gets done, period, turning “collaboration” into analysis paralysis. One commenter even dropped a link to a previous throwdown, proving this debate is basically tech’s version of pineapple on pizza.
golem14 questioned whether this silo dream works for platform-wide features—think one login across every Microsoft app—arguing you need a central brain because the under-the-hood stuff is brutal. yesfitz came from the regulated-world angle: silos can mess with compliance, yet admits re-siloing happens naturally as companies grow. Meanwhile, alexpotato’s tale of rapid turnover had people nodding: when teams disappear overnight, you strip dependencies to survive. The memes flew: “Silo Nation vs Collab-ocalypse,” “Slack detox,” and “API mandate cosplay.” Verdict? The crowd’s split between Team Boundaries and Team Big Hug, and the drama is delicious.
Key Points
- •The article advocates maximizing collaboration within teams and minimizing collaboration between teams.
- •Tightly collaborative teams benefit from shared goals, context, overlapping knowledge, innovation, and resilience to turnover.
- •As organizations grow, unchecked cross-team collaboration leads to exponential communication burdens and complexity.
- •A case at New Relic showed that rewarding cross-team collaboration created dependencies that made large projects unexecutable.
- •The proposed solution is to define interaction models, reduce dependencies, and add structure to prioritization and communication, exemplified by Amazon’s 2002 API mandate.