> In fact, I believe it pretty much killed the profession of software architect. And thank goodness. I am all in favor of more consideration, more quality, mor

> In fact, I believe it pretty much killed the profession of software architect. And thank goodness. I am all in favor of more consideration, more quality, more integrity. I like good architecture. But I think it's a giant mistake to create a software architect role. Every company where I saw that in practice, the average architect was a bloviator who did no actual work but was very excited to tell everybody else how to work. At the code level, this resulted in a lot of messes. The edicts and white papers sounded good in theory to the kind of people who decided the bonuses of the architects. But frequently they were unworkable in practice, causing a lot of code that conformed to the theory but was a pain to actually deal with. I agree with you that a lot of things are half-assed and rushed, of course. But we are never going back to a world of 18-36 month release cycles where people could stroke their chins for a quarter or two before building anything. Instead, we need to move in the direction of continually investing in quality, so that the design of systems improves over time. Something that I think is actually easier, in that waterfall design practices locked in important decisions early on, when people knew the least.