An architect's role often has an economic as well as a technical part to it. So, it's important to find out whether your candidate has a strong loyalty to a par

An architect's role often has an economic as well as a technical part to it. So, it's important to find out whether your candidate has a strong loyalty to a particular vendor stack. Ask. After you've had a conversation about a project in the candidate's track record, ask some pointed questions: -- what would you lose in performance and functionality if you reworked that project to run on cheaper infrastructure? (By that I mean such things as "standard edition" rather than "enterprise edition" of DBMSs, open source vs. paid licenses, etc.) This is a good way to get a handle on the candidate's economic reasoning ability. -- what was a significant performance bottleneck in that system? How did you address the problem? -- with the benefit of hindsight, what parts of that system would you say you overdesigned? underdesigned? -- what was a security vulnerability in the system? How did you plan for security? If you had to do security remediation, please describe it.