4 ms·

my current job is company with 1B in sales, with code base of one of the the main products started about 20 years ago, few additional acquired and semi integrat

by tguvot 6y ago

my current job is company with 1B in sales, with code base of one of the the main products started about 20 years ago, few additional acquired and semi integrated companies/products, high hiring rate of young and eager developers that know how to code very fast but don't know how to keep thing from blowing up in production environment. what i do spans from feature set and scope negotiations with product (because devs don't have either patience or knowledge to do so), design reviews of any semi major changes or additions, helping with designs, revamping sre/devops practices and company infrastructure, figuring out what land mines we got in our systems in the past and how to remove them and more generally what changes in architecture are needed in order to carry company forward given it's rapid growth. in overall I participate or oversee activities of few hundred developers across few continents and equal amount of sre and infra/tool people and use three spoken languages in order to do so (could use another one, but never got to learn it.) hence, i am not musk or ford that don't know how to weld. i know welding, it's just not the best way to use me. my job is to make sure that rest of assembly process will be smooth and car won't explode when it hits the road (and it's not something that welder does).

btilly 6y ago
Oh, I am sure that you do lots of work. And your company is organized in such a way that your role is critical path for lots of things. But if a company the size of Google can get by without software architects, why does your company need to be organized in such a way that you require that role? Back when I worked there, one of the universal shocks when people go to work for Google is that the overall architecture was light years ahead of anywhere else. The person usually given credit for that is https://research.google/people/jeff/ https://research.google/people/jeff/. Based on results, he may well be the best software architect alive. If you want to learn from his example, I recommend that you start with "a running prototype beats a whiteboard design". hence, i am not musk or ford that don't know how to weld. What sheer irony. BOTH Musk and Ford knew how to weld, and considered that knowledge essential to being able to do their jobs. Sure, they didn't do a lot of welding day to day. But how could they make correct decisions about how to build new machines if they didn't know how those machines are put together?
- tguvot 6y ago
  >But if a company the size of Google can get by without software architects, why does your company need to be organized in such a way that you require that role? I have a few notes here: 0. Google maybe is exception. But i never worked in google, so i don't know how good it is really. 1. Not all companies can pay same wages and get same talent as Google 2. Every time there is talks about GCP/AWS/Azure a lot of people say that all of those services seems to designed by completely different people and don't mesh together nicely. 3. I worked in one of the FAANGS , and while it's widely known for it's excellent engineering it was a massive dumpster fire. There were excellent people that did amazing things on lower infra level, but in the moment that you move a bit higher up it was disorganized mess of multiple teams not knowing how to collaborate properly what resulted in outages, sometimes rather big, which were not noticed from outside mostly due to size of production environments that allowed to shift users to still functioning parts of the system. Those outages were mostly result of not having somebody who will look at system end to end and will identify potential cascading failures or weak points in general. >BOTH Musk and Ford knew how to weld, and considered that knowledge essential to being able to do their jobs. Sure, they didn't do a lot of welding day to day. But how could they make correct decisions about how to build new machines if they didn't know how those machines are put together? I didn't say that I don't know how to code. I said that I won't pass coding interview. Companies that I work in have coders much better than me, but I am much better than them in understanding how system supposed to work end to end and how to prevent it from collapsing under various unpleasant scenarios.
  - btilly 6y ago
    I did work at Google, and their engineering architecture is insanely good. Their product design, not so much. Both aspects are visible when you use their site. I acknowledge that Google is able to hire incredible people. They also got a lucky break in hiring Jeff Dean early. However it is my considered belief that when you call Google an exception, you're reversing cause and effect. When people who come up with the architecture have to write code, work with their system, and see from experience what is wrong with it, they produce better architectures. It is not whether coding produces more value than architecture. It is that continuing to code informs their architectural decisions. For a similar idea in a very different industry, when Robert Townsend was CEO of Avis back in the 1960s he turned the company around. He made it profitable, and made it grow. One of the things he did that he says made a huge difference was to make it a rule that everyone worked the rental desk. Didn't matter whether you were the CEO, VP, big manager or whatever. One day a month you stood behind the rental desk and had to deal with live customers. And having that regular experience meant that problems in the organization that would otherwise go missed became instantly visible. Just like how actually having to code and debug things in your architecture makes architecture problems visible that otherwise you'd discount. It made Robert Townsend a better CEO. The corresponding exercise would make you a better architect. See https://hbr.org/2010/02/make-the-change-be-an-undercov https://hbr.org/2010/02/make-the-change-be-an-undercov for more.

by tguvot 6y ago

btilly 6y ago

Oh, I am sure that you do lots of work. And your company is organized in such a way that your role is critical path for lots of things. But if a company the size of Google can get by without software architects, why does your company need to be organized in such a way that you require that role? Back when I worked there, one of the universal shocks when people go to work for Google is that the overall architecture was light years ahead of anywhere else. The person usually given credit for that is https://research.google/people/jeff/ https://research.google/people/jeff/. Based on results, he may well be the best software architect alive. If you want to learn from his example, I recommend that you start with "a running prototype beats a whiteboard design". hence, i am not musk or ford that don't know how to weld. What sheer irony. BOTH Musk and Ford knew how to weld, and considered that knowledge essential to being able to do their jobs. Sure, they didn't do a lot of welding day to day. But how could they make correct decisions about how to build new machines if they didn't know how those machines are put together?

tguvot 6y ago
>But if a company the size of Google can get by without software architects, why does your company need to be organized in such a way that you require that role? I have a few notes here: 0. Google maybe is exception. But i never worked in google, so i don't know how good it is really. 1. Not all companies can pay same wages and get same talent as Google 2. Every time there is talks about GCP/AWS/Azure a lot of people say that all of those services seems to designed by completely different people and don't mesh together nicely. 3. I worked in one of the FAANGS , and while it's widely known for it's excellent engineering it was a massive dumpster fire. There were excellent people that did amazing things on lower infra level, but in the moment that you move a bit higher up it was disorganized mess of multiple teams not knowing how to collaborate properly what resulted in outages, sometimes rather big, which were not noticed from outside mostly due to size of production environments that allowed to shift users to still functioning parts of the system. Those outages were mostly result of not having somebody who will look at system end to end and will identify potential cascading failures or weak points in general. >BOTH Musk and Ford knew how to weld, and considered that knowledge essential to being able to do their jobs. Sure, they didn't do a lot of welding day to day. But how could they make correct decisions about how to build new machines if they didn't know how those machines are put together? I didn't say that I don't know how to code. I said that I won't pass coding interview. Companies that I work in have coders much better than me, but I am much better than them in understanding how system supposed to work end to end and how to prevent it from collapsing under various unpleasant scenarios.
- btilly 6y ago
  I did work at Google, and their engineering architecture is insanely good. Their product design, not so much. Both aspects are visible when you use their site. I acknowledge that Google is able to hire incredible people. They also got a lucky break in hiring Jeff Dean early. However it is my considered belief that when you call Google an exception, you're reversing cause and effect. When people who come up with the architecture have to write code, work with their system, and see from experience what is wrong with it, they produce better architectures. It is not whether coding produces more value than architecture. It is that continuing to code informs their architectural decisions. For a similar idea in a very different industry, when Robert Townsend was CEO of Avis back in the 1960s he turned the company around. He made it profitable, and made it grow. One of the things he did that he says made a huge difference was to make it a rule that everyone worked the rental desk. Didn't matter whether you were the CEO, VP, big manager or whatever. One day a month you stood behind the rental desk and had to deal with live customers. And having that regular experience meant that problems in the organization that would otherwise go missed became instantly visible. Just like how actually having to code and debug things in your architecture makes architecture problems visible that otherwise you'd discount. It made Robert Townsend a better CEO. The corresponding exercise would make you a better architect. See https://hbr.org/2010/02/make-the-change-be-an-undercov https://hbr.org/2010/02/make-the-change-be-an-undercov for more.