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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

In my career thus far, I can honestly say I've never, ever, ever seen an "Architect" who actually provided valuable inputs.

Not trying to say they don't exist, but I've just never witnessed someone with that title actually have a positive impact on any project I've worked on.

The only semi-positive value I've seen an architect have is when they counter another architect to allow the engineers get on with their work without interfering.

Maybe the issue with the job comes from the connotation that an architect is someone with supreme insights? Where as most usually, they just over simplify things and expect engineers to deal with the implementation details (the hard part).

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In my experience, architects who are valuable to their teams tend to be the ones who rarely do any "architecture" themselves; instead they work their arse off trying to smash apart every last blocker to the engineers in a team being able to own architectural responsibilities themselves. (This may include asking smart questions to help a team who don't really do systems thinking start engaging with it). This inevitably ends up off in the EA realm grappling with Conway-type questions: not so much "how should we structure our software to make it good?" as "how should we structure our organisation so it naturally produces good software?"

Sadly these people are also rare as it requires a combination of sufficient technical skill and the ability to effectively navigate the people side of the equation.

The "white paper" style of architect is very frustrating in comparison, not least because they are too removed from the context and impact of their decisions. This results in a situation where a team views their architect as merely a source of additional work, much of which is frustrating and pointless if not outright damaging to the system being built.

I was an enterprise architect for about a year and it was dullest most soul-sucking job I ever had. In a sense, it was incredibly cushy. I had zero responsibility. I could easily just drop technical decisions on teams and not have to deal with the repercussions. But it really just drove me nuts. And I hated the other architects because they had set this system up and seemed perfectly content.

My role before and after as a director was always to give my tech leads a really long leash. I try to never force decisions on them, but rather let them work their own way and my job is just to make sure they've considered the project goals correctly and their solution is going to fit.

We have a great architect right now, but he's really just an engineer designated as the "architect". He also codes sometimes.

> We have a great architect right now, but he's really just an engineer designated as the "architect".

Why is anyone assuming that an software architect is not supposed to be a software engineer?

The software world is not divided as the civil engineering world, where architects are responsible for meatspace UX and engineers are tasked with bringing the UX to life.

In the software world, software architects are expected to be experienced software engineers who are tasked with coming up with design decisions upfront that render the software development project feasible and economical by picking which technologies to reuse, which modules/services to develop independently, and how to run in production.

Which of hear tasks is not the job of a software engineer?

I feel being an "Architect" is trying to do half of the job that's atomic, unseparable, because the "architecture" half informs and is informed by the other half, "writing and running code", both of them working best in a tight feedback loop. An architect not writing code has to rely on engineers in their team to communicate to them all the insights gained by implementing the architecture - which is a really bad idea, because it's already hard to precisely articulate your feelings about the code to yourself, and now you have to explain that to another person and hope they understand.

I feel like an "Architect" should not be a standalone role. The architect for a project should be an engineer working on the project that can make decisions about the underlying architecture when a decision is needed.

Much of an architect's role won't be visible to developers beneath them and -- like a manager -- involves coordinating with other projects or other business units. That a specific project exists at all to work on or is otherwise a discussion topic is often the result of an architect's work.

In my company, every software engineer also has the software architect role. This way everybody is aware that they are welcome to think about the architecture of software. There are no dedicated architects. This works quite well in my experience.

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