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Comment by deong | Hacker News Reader

I still don't think that's actually the question that was being asked. It's not, "why do you think your spelling was preferred?" but rather "given that the complaint is how inflexible the senior tech was on the issue, why were you just as inflexible?"

Particularly given that it's a UK company, the request may be arguably wrong, but it's at least semi-reasonable. Why make such a huge deal over it from either side?

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Maybe he figured the work was done and wanted to move on to something else. It should have been a trivial issue, either way, and he wasn't the one making it a non-trivial issue. But the architect's propensity for blowing it out of proportion was a good signal that his working relationship with that architect was never going to be good, if something as simple as that was a problem.

I would have done the same thing. If someone is hanging your job over your head over spelling in source code, then the issue is no longer about spelling in source code. It's about dick wagging.

given that the complaint is how inflexible the senior tech was on the issue, why were you just as inflexible?"

Software engineers are a stubborn bunch. It's kind of necessary given the nature of programming. However, if promoted to an architect, stubbornness is a real problem, with little to no upside.

Architects will usually stick mostly to design and not do a lot of debugging. So that stubbornness is not useful. But it sure can rear its ugly head when it comes to pointless conflicts like this one. And the problem is, all the junior developers are also stubborn.

Welcome to software development. What you want in in a software architect is primarily a diplomat. Not someone who is stubborn.

I disagree. Before I went back to academia, I had both job titles at various times. The whole point of having someone in one of these "architect" roles is that they're supposed to be there to exercise judgment they have demonstrated to you as a company to be reliable.

If there's a disagreement that can't be resolved between the two of them, the architect is the one whose stubbornness I value more. You have managers to be diplomats. You have technical leadership to say, "they pay me more than you because they trust my judgment more than yours. I've heard your argument; I found it not compelling enough to overrule my own experience and judgment, and the decision has been made."

Ideally you have more than one such person to help surface the cases where the architect was wrong, but if you're routinely treating them as though they're no more reliable than junior developers, why are you paying them so much?

As an architect myself, I'm sure that some of the decisions I make look like bikeshedding - and maybe they are, but they're born out of a desire to make our services easier to implement and manage at scale. I do try to avoid arguments over trivia, but it's a fine line to walk. When you have a small system, the kinds of convention, indirection, and abstraction you'd see in large ones don't make a lot of sense, except when it comes time to scale out.

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