One of my favorite things in the world is when software architects come up to me and tell me how much they enjoyed my piece about how "software architect" is such a bullshit role at most companies. I love you guys. charity.wtf/2023/03/09/a... - ThreadSky

charity.wtf • 86 days ago

One of my favorite things in the world is when software architects come up to me and tell me how much they enjoyed my piece about how "software architect" is such a bullshit role at most companies.

I love you guys.

https://charity.wtf/2023/03/09/architects-anti-patterns-and-organizational-fuckery/

Comments

ajpotts01.bsky.social•85 days ago

The last time I got asked to consider stepping up to an architect role I quit in response 😂

charity.wtf•73 days ago

Snort! 🥂

mattbarcomb.bsky.social•85 days ago

Have you read Bullshit Jobs?
https://a.co/d/aKEllaL

Wondering which category you'd put software architect into? 😆

charity.wtf•73 days ago

YES. That book rocked my world. Losing Graeber so young was such a blow to the world. 💔

maggie.bsky.social•85 days ago

Just sent this one around the current employer. It was wonderful when you first wrote it too.

charity.wtf•73 days ago

🙏🥰

jhannes.bsky.social•86 days ago

I don't have time for people who have more opinions than they have got commitment

tmclaugh.bsky.social•85 days ago

I need to read this thoroughly.

The issue I face right now is multiple siloed teams doing their own thing with no coordination between them when they’re all needed to build an internal product that won’t suck.

I’ll have one team make a decision that will screw another team in the long run.

tmclaugh.bsky.social•85 days ago

What I’m doing now is focusing on where we want that product to be in 2 years. The user (in our case developer) experience we want to provide. That should hopefully provide a certain amount of leeway to teams while also ruling out some terrible approaches they might otherwise have tried.

charity.wtf•73 days ago

Filling a definite need in the ecosystem. 🙏🥂

performacology.com•85 days ago

...design becoming too untethered from execution (the “Frank Gehry” syndrome)"

❤️❤️❤️

wadsworth.dev•86 days ago

I 100% agree with this. Frankly, my title isn’t a good title. My role is to help teams, not to decide things. I do spend some of my day (some more than others) actually writing code because I don’t want to lose that.

brunobat.bsky.social•85 days ago

The architect role can enable companies to hire a bunch of junior and mid level engineers and try to come up with something.
It’s a trap with dozens of meetings a week to glue things together. A good recipe for burnout. Run!

charity.wtf•73 days ago

Oh God, I bet.

mi3e.bsky.social•85 days ago

I've lived through having a very strong opinionated empowered group of very senior architects to having practically no architects. Both deeply flawed models. Best is staff level hands on enginers per wide domain and a small team of enterprise architects steering the overall tech and arch direction.

charity.wtf•73 days ago

Love this. Thank you.

naugtur.pl•85 days ago

I met some of those. To their credit, they really appreciated someone with a different background and hands-on work who had the communication skills to disagree with them beyond the first attempt at a counter argument.

charity.wtf•73 days ago

The good ones are INCREDIBLE. 🙌🕺

francofernando.com•85 days ago

I agree with you. From what I've seen, architects play either a critical or a useless role. Not a lot in the middle.

charity.wtf•73 days ago

👆🫡

dacut.bsky.social•86 days ago

I somehow missed this earlier, but this is *so* spot on: "Only the people responsible for building software systems get to make decisions about how those systems get built."

I have been/still am (ish) an architect; people only trusted me because I then built (or helped build) what I drew out. 1/2

dacut.bsky.social•86 days ago

A lot of this means *iterating the architecture*. No ivory towers! My house has a septic system that (in the records) has a design drawing and an as-built drawing.

Some of my final architectures differ slightly, others significantly. You don't (sometimes can't) know all the reqs up front! 2/2

charity.wtf•73 days ago

Never can. 🥂📈

roneda.bsky.social•21 days ago

📌

mcintosh.farm•85 days ago

Promoted to architect after several months at new company. I still think it's a way to ID people w/EXP, who can teach and with the ability to explain "DANGER" areas, who can document and cross teams and leadership. STILL have to code! 26 PRs+reviews! Less tech, more "politics" which != bad but diff

ericbrooke.bsky.social•84 days ago

I agree. Software Architecture is core to any good Software Engineer and should be one of the capabilities on a career track for all software engineers

peter-k-steiner.bsky.social•86 days ago

Senior Architect reporting in: yep, it’s bullshit.

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