ukigumo

The author of this article does himself a poor service by exposing the limits of his knowledge and his unwillingness to learn from others.

Being a good coder is really nice, and you earn loads of cookie points with your team members and even some of your managers, I'm sure, but a valuable engineer (the kind who is trusted to make decisions about products) is one who understands how the scope of his activities affects the product perception for the clients and, ultimately, the bottom line for the company.

Want an example or two? Sure. 1) If 2% of your users represent ~20% of your revenue their concerns and requirements will be prioritized accordingly.

2) If you need to know a specific set of information that you don't have access to at any time, ask for it. If such information is not available, raise that concern and work with your team and the product manager to make a judgment call.

I think you are missing some key aspects of the architect role in that you don't mention requirements (apart from hardware requirements which are always funny coming from a developer...) and you only point the communication towards peers but not clients and business partners.

The architecture process can be summed up along these lines:

- Identify stakeholders, their concerns and objective. Translate these into goals and requirements;

- Understanding, validating and designing the requirements;

- Identifying possible solutions but also constraints, risks and assumptions. Document and validate them;

- Document decisions and solutions with blueprints and design documents (diagrams, tables, natural text, etc) that are actionable and can be used as reference material;

- Limit the scope of the development activity to the requirements in order of relevance (to the sprint, or other time-bound metric);

Behalve dat, goed geddan jonge! (edited for clarity)

A technology architect should be technical and be able to keep himself on top of new developments in his area (software, networks, storage, etc) as well as having a good solid understanding of the adjacent or related areas. The focus is how newer and greater things fit together into the big picture.

A solutions architect looks over the fitness for purpose and is accountable for the delivery at project level which means that he might have to make decisions (together with his stakeholders) about which technology, framework or methodology to be employed in order to ensure the deliverables are mapped to the requirements with minimal or no slippage. The focus is business benefits from technology.

An enterprise architect is a whole different beast and I'm not even going to go there at this stage. I'll just say that being technical is as useful as being tall in that it makes for a good first impression but does not correlate to quality or effectiveness overall.

I am of the opinion that everyone involved in IT should have a good understanding of the past, present and future of technology as well as a systems thinking capability that allows one to understand how different systems interact and react to his own area of expertise. The balance of knowing how to do it and why do we do it is the difference between slave labor and expert work.

This is very true. However trusting that open source does not include such vulnerabilities is a leap of faith we cannot make which is why auditing and quality control process are needed.

You have to trust the vendor's interest in making a profit. Nothing wrong with that :-)

Closed source (usually) gives you Ts&Cs, support model and some level of guarantee of fitness for purpose which is why we pay to use it. This is not to say that there aren't bugs that seem to take forever to fix, but usually that is not the case at least not when there is a risk of the product becoming unsalable.

Of course there are closed source software or appliances that just are not worth their cost because they fail to mitigate the risks of having us trust what we cannot see, but these usually fail to gain any significant market share.

An architect, at least one worth his title, does not work in isolation.

The article talks about a type of architect that I call tech lead. It has as much to do with the architecture process as a front-end developer has to do with mechanical engineering.

There are many types of architect, with vastly different roles and functions within an organisation from pre-sales to business strategy so I strongly argue that people should stop looking to become architects as a step up from being engineers in the same way that fashion models should stop looking at picking up acting as some sort of a graduation when when they get too old for the catwalk.

Some can do it because they have picked up enough knowledge and insight along the way but, for most, it's a new career with a whole new set of skills and responsibilities.

I'm sorry, my previous comment was not an attempt at changing your functionalist, would-be-objectivist and elitist view of the world but just a veiled reference to space cookies because you seem to be high on something. Maybe it's a big white horse, who knows?

If it matters to you I'm not poor, at least according to HMRC it's quite the contrary.

Let's talk about the ingredients you need to make your cookies shall we?

The scary part is that Google and other companies that are on the forefront of the new digital age still operate under a strict post-industrialist mindset. The cult of the busy man and the hinderance of personal life outside of work is absolutely mind blowing to me.

Aren't we supposed to work smart instead of working long hours? Aren't we supposed to improve ourselves spiritually and emotionally once we have reached a plateau of physical and social security?

Good to hear that you have a plan because it's going to be costly to do pre-screenings, code quality assurance, process design, lead generation, payment and account handling, project and resource management, etc. And architects, you need architects :-)

On any given day, the chances of success for a startup are tiny, infinitesimal even, but I think this co-op idea could actually be viable.

It needs, however, to add something else to the mix other than just an easily readable manifesto. It needs to have a portfolio, and it needs to offer governance and evidence of good financial and operational conduct, which is what corps look for when assessing risk and on-boarding a new specialist supplier.

The fact that you are only looking for developers makes me think there is much you haven't thought about yet :-)

"Have a strategy. Most people don’t. Occasionally take a little bit of time to think about how you’re executing against your strategy. Specifically, remember that someday you need to have a monopoly "

Remember to ask yourself 4 questions: https://blog.ukigumo.eu/content/images/2015/02/governance-qu...

(sorry for the bad image quality btw)

Thank you.

Quick question as it seems I'm missing something here.. Why is joyent stewarding node.js? I mean, are the core devs working for the company?

And so they should. These companies are going after markets that have been resisting IT for years, never trully taking advantage of any innovation for higher efficiency and consumer benefits and therefore are just sitting ducks for startups coming in and disrupting their economies and processes.

I think that the actual chasm is in the lack of understanding of the architecture process that the OP shows. Also, I think he means "A function, not a job" because Role is actually a synonym for Job in IT services. Not being picky, just a little bit pricky. :-)

That doesn't seem to be the case. Think Uber for instance.

There are many types of leader and a flat organisation just means that you won't get to be a "type 1" leader, or an imposed leader if you will. That doesn't mean you can't rise to the position using skills and personality.

If you really want to go for leadership in your career look up some courses and books on the subject and talk to a mentor or even HR about developing a career plan.

Good luck!

Tech Lead is a nice sounding phrase but what does it actually mean? Pat Kua (the interviewee) talks about architects, lead developers as well as team leaders with budgeting and hiring responsibilities and to my mind these are all quite different roles within an organisation on any reasonable size and require different attributes and focuses.

As for the soft skills that were strongly emphasised in the interview I fully agree that it is a necessary trait of anyone who wishes to lead in whatever form or context but techies are no different than accountants or any other inherently individualistic professional in that regard.

I think TW is a bit different because they never get the really big contracts. :-)

Apparently "think different" is a one-way view these days.

In any case this is not a case of discrimination as much as it is a case of poor screening and hiring. For a lobbyist position (a face and a voice of a company towards legislators) Apple should have vetoed him based on possible conflicts of interest with company policies and social stance.

Not to get all hippie on you, but have you considered mindful meditation as an approach to quiet down your mind and improve focus?

You may find that the realisation that you are becoming more focused when you need it will help your relieve the stress that's causing your burnout.

Thanks!

Good point, people and function managers get called all sorts of job titles, VP, Head of, Team Lead, Manager, etc and its funny to see how multinational (specifically EU/US) companies deal with this since there is a bit of a "dick measuring" competition for nicest sounding titles among peers.

Good to hear you guys have a vision.

May I offer some advice though? Big corp also needs help finding talent (maybe more so than startups) so you may want to _also_ target that market segment going forward.

Good luck!

So, first things first: Love the software and the concept of visualizing your activity spread in a radar plot. Well done!

Now for the rant: I am an IT architect. There are many architects working in IT but few of them do anything that is related to what I do. I see job postings for Enterprise Sharepoint Architect and I cry a little, others for CTO/Architect/senior developer and I question if they are maybe hiring for 3 positions and are just really bad at writing jobspecs. I often have VPs working under my direction and govern the work of Project Managers and yet people contact me and ask if I'm interested in a devops role.

Recruitment is broken and I hope companies like workshape.io are here to fix it.

Don't we already take a risk by trusting our income (for most of us, our financial security) to a single company?

If profits go down for your employer, your job may be at risk even in companies that operate in a rigid post-industrial revolution management style where you are forced to be at least 40h in the office.

As to why we don't have more business owners, I think that is caused by cultural and educational pressures to conform which then causes us to believe there will always be someone else who will take initiative for us, lead us, or give us a job. But, this is just my opinion of course.

In essence, two things:

- Your ability to do your job and meet your obligations. If you can take 3 months off and still meet the expectations set for you then that might be ok. It might also be a sign that you need a bigger challenge, but that's a different topic.

- Yourself. If you transform yourself from a serf that works for money into a key contributor in an enterprise, then the quality of your engagement with your employer changes to a level where you feel responsible and accountable for both your own success and that of the company.

Absolutely. But we will need to change our leadership style, or our leaders if that's what it takes, to reap any benefits from innovation.

Yes there are, I'm not advocating for a one solution fits all.