Your experience with "Enterprise Architects"? | Hacker News Reader

Your experience with "Enterprise Architects"?

1 pointThrowadev5 comments

Today was my first time interacting with an Enterprise Architect. He entirely lived up to the negative EA stereotypes. At my work we deal with another company regularly. They are fairly large but nothing they do is complex. It's just a few web sites, some eCommerce, and some corp. infrastructure.

We need a web service method to verify that a username and password were valid or not. This resulted in a meeting with their newly appointed EA. He told us it would take a week, or a week and a half to get it done, because he had to talk to the developers "make a design, and make sure things done more formally, because these guys typically just start coding, we need them to have a more methodical process." This would take me 30-45 minutes from start to deploy.

I picture this guy going off to his developers and having a design and architecture meeting to plan out this single method. I'm picturing a UML diagram. Oh shit, you also made a diagram about how this is going to use a 3-tiered architecture!? Good one, buddy! You really put Visio through its paces today!

This is not banking, or something that needs compliance checks. The database already exists, the accounts are already there, the passwords are already hashed, and no data is being created or modified. We just want them to tell us if the combo passed in is valid.

After 4+ years of the projects being run by him they are still stuck in this world where they don't even have the basics done, no automated tests, no automated builds. The offshore dev's log into the development environment's web server. You know why? Because Visual Studio is installed there, and they all do development from that machine. There are many different copies of the main web project there, and only one person knows which one is the "real" one. It's definitely not one of the ones that have "real version" as part of the folder name. I tried all of those.

Any similar experiences? Any advice on dealing with this type of architect?

Figure out what they do and who their customers are, and start a company competing with them on price, because obviously his practices add a huge overhead that you can avoid.

I thought about that but I don't think it's possible. The people who hired him in the first place trust him as an authority on technology. They are blind to the fact that a small team of competent hackers about 1/5 the size and cost of their current support structure could deliver better quality, better results, faster. They would rather not admit to the fact that the person they hired was a bad choice compared to what's out there.

Somewhat related mentality, I often run into this situation where I see the non-tech leaders of a company talking to each other, trying to get stuff done, and they come to an impasse because each party's trusted tech person says something that contradicts what the other tech lead at the other company said. The non-tech bosses always tend to believe that their own tech people know what they are talking about and that the tech people at the other place are wrong. Usually you have a more hackery or pragmatic one saying something is possible, or should be doable quickly, and then you have another "enterprise architect-y" one saying it's not possible, or would require some large cost/effort/time to accomplish.

They are blind to the fact that a small team...

Be careful with that. A lot of times, inefficiency is a cover for siphoning funds to upper management. You can get in huge trouble for pointing out "inefficiencies" that are really ways to get money out of a company.

OK, maybe time to contradict my other reply to your post. The company in question has undergone several changes in management over the past few years. I have witnessed a ton of mismanagement that results in millions of wasted dollars each year.

For example, they rewrite their entire website every two years for the past 6 years, but each time the project launches with fewer features, and results in lower traffic and lower conversions. They change datacenters about every 18 months. Revenue decreases.

They were bought by a popular PE firm and taken private. Gutted, and that's when all this started. The ownership has changed hands, but I see a constant rotation of management from a network of people connected to the PE firm. The PE firm finally did some weird stuff with chopping the company into two and selling both pieces. Now the main part of the company is owned by a private bank or hedge fund (can't remember exactly, but I can look it up).

I get the feeling that if someone looked into everything that's happened they'd uncover a lot of stuff. This has gone under the radar because it's not a public company, and there is so much turnover and a level of decoupling between upper management and the regular rank & file that no one would really know where to begin with raising flags. I'm guessing it's all legal, but shady. The PE firm has a very poor reputation, so I think the general public would be interested to dissect exactly what the fate is of a company that gets acquired by them, as a case study.

Oh well. End rant.

Any personal experiences with this happening?

I don't think there's a danger of it happening in this case because I'm not part of the company. The Enterprise Architect and the consulting firm are both outside companies that mine works with. I'm not gonna butt into the politics of either one.

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