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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Do companies still have absurdly well-compensated "architects" who do nothing but diagram?

Yes, for many companies it's a critical part of the career path for programmers who don't want to be managers.

So all the good programmers (or programmers that stick around long enough) become architects. The system actively weeds out people with lots of domain knowledge and an ability to solve problems by promoting them into architects.

Theoretically architects should be helping teams write even better code than they did before, but usually the teams ignore what the architects do, so there's a whole "us versus them" thing going on.

Not all architects have a programming background. Eg. in Lucent, the architects where postdocs and PhD's in wireless technologies and related fields. I think even Google has postdocs as architects.

I worked at Google for a long time and never encountered anyone with the title "architect" or with a similar job role.

Given how much money IBM still makes off of Rational, clearly somebody's writing UML. I imagine that all that UML's being written at places like banks, defense contractors, three letter agencies...

If there really are people at an internet company like Yahoo doing that, well, wow. I don't see how a company where such a thing even was allowed to develop could have a future in this industry.

Having worked with some of the first few Rational employees, my understanding is that Rational was/is very good at sales through their consulting arms (hired a consultant? congrats, you just paid a member of their sales force to wear your employee badge!). They don't have particularly great usage numbers on those sold products, though.

That said, there are some very useful UML diagrams for non-architect-titled folks. For people stuck using class-heavy systems (some of which are out of their control), the UML Sequence Diagram is both useful and a very compact way to explain "what happens when the user goes <poke>": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_diagram

Sequence diagrams existed before UML and for getting stuff done, and being able to maintain it, I prefer http://www.websequencediagrams.com/

I just paste the diagram description into my documents as "hidden text", and everyones happy.

or use mscgen (http://www.mcternan.me.uk/mscgen/)

I find it impossible to imagine anybody who can write a perfectly working software in a UML diagram without writing & testing a line of code

Many times, the word architect is just a word pre-pended to senior technology worker titles. I know several people who have that in their title and they are solid technologists with lot's of real-world experience. While the term may be abused often, many architects are great. Bad apples are easy to spot, no matter their title.

Damn right they do. These "architects" are typically folks who have just a bit of coding experience but learned to navigate the bureaucratic waters to their advantage, and they love it.

A real "architect" who really solves business problems with technology is called a CTO

And the architect's eventual spot is CIO (a CXO title as useless as "architect")

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle

The principle is commonly phrased, "employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence."

Yes. One enterprise that I am familiar with had a team of about 15 architects, most of whom were former programmers. None had programmed once in the enterprise architect role.

All of us here on HN are much more familiar with smaller outfits--smaller by more than an order of magnitude that typical "enterprise" outfits.

The diversity of programming environments is actually quite vast. Here on HN we are all closer to the actual code than a significant fraction of these environments.

Having done the enterprise thing (as well as the startup thing) that is how I prefer it.

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