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Comment by gabereiser | Hacker News Reader

A quick Google search of software architect jobs for Google proves otherwise. Like the comment above, large orgs slice up these roles and have architects (like myself) to help guide software teams into cohesion on platforms that require high collaboration between services to support a multitude of products. Anyone who says architecture isn’t needed, isn’t doing anything at scale (or blissfully unaware that their ship is sinking).

Great Architects work closely with the dev teams to give them reference diagrams, proof of concept code, and the art of the possible. Bad architects drop a big requirements doc and walk away. Almost every large organization has architects (enterprise, solutions, software, and cloud).

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You will see these kinds of titles in Silicon Valley's IT departments (these are different from Engineering) and in B2B sales related arms. Architect vs. dev is not normally how their core software engineering functions are organized. Everyone is a "software engineer" and everyone has a "design and architecture" competency to meet. It's more emphasized at senior levels, but it's always there.

I see these kinds of titles in product teams. I’m not disputing what you claim, that architects are primarily B2B in Silicon Valley. It’s just not true anywhere else. I’ve been a coder and engineer for a really long time. Now I’m an architect after finding management not to be my thing. I code. I build products. Any organization where the developers are also the architects are just flying by the seat of their pants and again, aren’t doing anything at scale (yet?). It’s extremely important to recognize the different areas of architecture. Enterprise and Solutions architecture is primarily B2B focused. Software Architecture and Systems Architecture can be B2C focused or product focused.

I’ve worked as a software engineer at places where everyone did architecture and it always ended up in a hairball mess that some senior/principal would recommend rewriting after 2 years.

This. Architects are needed once scale makes it impossible for the majority of engineers to understand the big picture.

> Any organization where the developers are also the architects are just flying by the seat of their pants and again, aren’t doing anything at scale (yet?).

How did you reach this conclusion? Both Amazon and Google don't structure their software engineering teams around an 'Architect' title.

I also searched the Google Carrera page for Architect positions and the great majority of them are customer facing roles with very few Architect positions assigned to specialized fields.

An architect who codes and builds products is what we would call a senior or staff engineer. We don't have any room on or teams for people who are solely devs/coders; even new grads are expected to grow into small scale design and architecture over time.

I don't know about Google, but where I work we have essentially one single technical line and people are expected to contribute to both development and making architectural decisions (and operations, etc, etc). Obviously, higher ranked staff are expected to make more architectural decisions vs. development, but it is a gradual growth process, and there are no positional distinctions.

I worked for google and never seen anyone with a title of architect or anyone who’d only do designs without getting their hands dirty. You must be looking at “cloud solutions architects” or whatever support-like roles

Why would the architect provide proof of concept code? Feels like a completely different role than large scale planning. This is something I would expect a manager or senior dev to assist a junior with.

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