3 ms·

>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

by 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.
- tguvot 6y ago
  >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. Totally agree with this. I personally started with installing trumpet winsock and netscape navigator on win3.11. I did customer support while been developer. I went through most of positions that are usually part of software development org and dealt with with most aspects of software. And I consider myself lucky to been able to do so. But the unfortunate truth it's that in majority of companies that develop software (lets get outside of silicone valley for a moment), developers tend to be very far removed from production environments and from clients. As example, I was hired to work on a new, from scratch product, in one of biggest suppliers of software for telecoms (8B in sales). Over there "core engineering" was tasked with developing "core functionality" and there were totally separate delivery organization that will take this code and adapt it to client needs and will write installers/deployment systems, figure out how it actually integrate, run, etc. Clients weren't accessible to core engineering and internal product management couldn't talk to them either. Also, the overall approach was that it's perfectly normal that software will crash and leave everything in inconsistent mess, hence there were mandatory tooling to be developed for manual operation to "fix things". I spent first few months arguing with my boss that it's not normal and that we must deliver software that can be installed and work without crashing left and right. I got to built first devops org in company, first private cloud lab, pretty much first in company integrated ci/cd, jira+confluence (because company used internally developed "agile" tools that were unusable. and i actually got visit from internal auditors questioning me why we spent money on something that already exists in company), lobby to create track for engineers to interact with clients so they will understand what is real operational environment of software they are writing and what are the real requirements so they will be able to do better job, get training for developers so they will learn that there is something outside of "enterprise java" (as anecdote, when i presented rabbitmq as part of architecture, i got asked to what java standard it corresponds and when i said to none, i was told that they don't really understand why would I use it). Project was amazing success and delivered more in less time than was common in the company. (manager got fast tracked to vp/svp/gen manager overseeing 2B in business within 4 years. I got relocation to states :). my point i guess, it's that most of software development in most companies is disorganized mess with developers been completely detached from realities production environments. And when I am hired, pardon the pathos, my job is to bring order into the chaos or light into the darkness or whatever. In cases when I am out of my depth in some areas (i well aware about limitations of my knowledge) , i usually have enough pull to hire some domain specialists that I can outsource to them designs/implementation.

by tguvot 6y ago

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.

tguvot 6y ago
>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. Totally agree with this. I personally started with installing trumpet winsock and netscape navigator on win3.11. I did customer support while been developer. I went through most of positions that are usually part of software development org and dealt with with most aspects of software. And I consider myself lucky to been able to do so. But the unfortunate truth it's that in majority of companies that develop software (lets get outside of silicone valley for a moment), developers tend to be very far removed from production environments and from clients. As example, I was hired to work on a new, from scratch product, in one of biggest suppliers of software for telecoms (8B in sales). Over there "core engineering" was tasked with developing "core functionality" and there were totally separate delivery organization that will take this code and adapt it to client needs and will write installers/deployment systems, figure out how it actually integrate, run, etc. Clients weren't accessible to core engineering and internal product management couldn't talk to them either. Also, the overall approach was that it's perfectly normal that software will crash and leave everything in inconsistent mess, hence there were mandatory tooling to be developed for manual operation to "fix things". I spent first few months arguing with my boss that it's not normal and that we must deliver software that can be installed and work without crashing left and right. I got to built first devops org in company, first private cloud lab, pretty much first in company integrated ci/cd, jira+confluence (because company used internally developed "agile" tools that were unusable. and i actually got visit from internal auditors questioning me why we spent money on something that already exists in company), lobby to create track for engineers to interact with clients so they will understand what is real operational environment of software they are writing and what are the real requirements so they will be able to do better job, get training for developers so they will learn that there is something outside of "enterprise java" (as anecdote, when i presented rabbitmq as part of architecture, i got asked to what java standard it corresponds and when i said to none, i was told that they don't really understand why would I use it). Project was amazing success and delivered more in less time than was common in the company. (manager got fast tracked to vp/svp/gen manager overseeing 2B in business within 4 years. I got relocation to states :). my point i guess, it's that most of software development in most companies is disorganized mess with developers been completely detached from realities production environments. And when I am hired, pardon the pathos, my job is to bring order into the chaos or light into the darkness or whatever. In cases when I am out of my depth in some areas (i well aware about limitations of my knowledge) , i usually have enough pull to hire some domain specialists that I can outsource to them designs/implementation.