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It's hilariously on point that this doesn't mention how any of this would in any way benefit the business. Don't get me wrong, I've spent my time in "architectu

It's hilariously on point that this doesn't mention how any of this would in any way benefit the business. Don't get me wrong, I've spent my time in "architecture" to the point where I was part of the team which defined the national strategy for IT architecture in Denmark called Rammearkitekturen. I've yet to see any form of measured example where architectural work actually provided a measurable net benefit for an organisation though. In my experience it doesn't even lead to better code bases, because focusing too much on it tends to make people over complicate things to a ridiculous degree. Spending time both reviewing and retrospectiving and whatever other bloated pseudo-work terms various well paid consultants will come up with seems like a further waste of time. In my book. Disclaimer: I think architects are pseudo-jobbers who should be replaced by a competent employee who will do actual work. Even in operations I tend to think having full time architects is a gigantic waste of resources. To me, full time architects are only ever going to fill the same role HR management advisors do, which is to make bad managers feel better about the decisions they take.

jiehong 2y ago
Besides, architectures often need to change when the implementation finds assumptions that aren’t holding. The one benefit I see is: ensuring everyone follows a standard ‘blessed’ way, and contain the chaos a bit. What I dislike about most architecture people is the lack of care they tend to have to handle a gradual transition from one architecture to another. This part tends to cost much more than they care.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > The one benefit I see is: ensuring everyone follows a standard ‘blessed’ way, and contain the chaos a bit. Never underestimate the ability of a couple hundred developers (and users, POs, domain experts and so on) for creating chaos. The fight is real. BTW, I was once nicknamed Dr. No.
smokel 2y ago
> I've yet to see any form of measured example where architectural work actually provided a measurable net benefit for an organisation though. These things are hard to measure, but I've seen too much of the reverse as well: over-enthusiastic developers with no feel for the customer, no understanding of the domain, and no shared vision, but perfectly happy to ruin a codebase. Especially in the field of having a shared vision, I think a good architect can do wonders. I tend to see an architect as a multiplier for success. A good one has value above 1, the experiences you shared might have resulted in a negative one. Edit: actually read the article, and boy do I agree with your sentiment now :)
- rbanffy 2y ago
  I'd go as far as to say good architecture is an invisible enabler. You don't think about the work that went inside Ruby on Rails to structure its functionality in a way Rails developers find productive and comfortable. At the same time, another kind of architect, Oscar Niemeyer, has a good reputation between those who admire his works, and a very different one (sometimes good, but often terrible) from those who have to live and work in his buildings. Architects of all kinds walk the thin line between elegance and practicality.
- Quothling 2y ago
  I agree with everything you say. My personal issue is that I've very rarely seen the difference in impact by having full time architects. It's obviously very anecdotal, but in my experience, you can get both good and bad architecture regardless of it being governed by specialized architects or regular developers. I think the scale may even tip in the developers favour. It's probably important to point out that almost every Danish organisation is fairly tiny, even well past the startup phase. With that in mind, I'd always prefer a "regular" developer because they'll not bog things down with stuff like this article suggests. > Edit: actually read the article, and boy do I agree with your sentiment now :) Exactly, all I read was that I'd be spending even more of my time in useless meetings.
  - hakunin 2y ago
    It's really hard to be a good architect, because their job is not supposed to be to leave their mark. An architect is doing a great job when the codebase is boring, and everybody talks about business. That doesn't help the architect however, because people can't tell how it would've been had they not been there. "Our codebase is so simple and boring, why do we even need an architect". That's how you get the kind of architects that try to look impressive to the management. There are a few things a business can do to get a good kind of architect. 1. Hire them to be hands on with code (give them secondary features or refactors, not major lifts, since shipping speed is not the priority). 2. Don't give them authority over devs, rather ask them to provide mentorship and demos. Their job is to excite devs about a clearly better approach, not to force their opinion. 3. Encourage devs to come to the architect for advice as needed. 4. Have the architect organize long term refactors[1] when needed. Basically make them a developer whose audience is other developers, and the product of their work is developer buy-in/excitement over good practices and software design directions. [1]: https://max.engineer/long-term-refactors https://max.engineer/long-term-refactors
jph 2y ago
Some large public examples of where software architectural work provides a large benefit: 1. Amazon all-in on API service architecture thus creating Amazon Web Services. 2. Sun all-in on attempting run-anywhere architecture thus creating the Java Virtual Machine. 3. Facebook all-in on PHP single-page rendering architecture thus creating HipHop. 4. Linus all-in on Unix x86 architecture thus creating Linux, then all-in on distributed versioning architecture thus creating Git. 5. Google all-in on horizontal scale architecture thus creating Bigtable, MapReduce, Kubernetes, etc. 6. Apple all-in on vertical device architecture thus creating Apple Silicon, iPod/iPhone, physical stores, etc. 7. Hashicorp all-in on infrastructure as code architecture thus creating Terraform, Vault, etc. 8. 37signals all-in on convention-over-configuration MVC web app architecture thus creating Ruby on Rails. 9. NVIDIA all-in on GPUs thus creating CUDA and enabling matrix math speedups of many programs.
lucianbr 2y ago
> architects should be replaced by a competent employee who will do actual work To me this sounds like "police should be replaced with citizens not breaking the law". It would be great, except it's impossible.

jiehong 2y ago

Besides, architectures often need to change when the implementation finds assumptions that aren’t holding. The one benefit I see is: ensuring everyone follows a standard ‘blessed’ way, and contain the chaos a bit. What I dislike about most architecture people is the lack of care they tend to have to handle a gradual transition from one architecture to another. This part tends to cost much more than they care.

rbanffy 2y ago
> The one benefit I see is: ensuring everyone follows a standard ‘blessed’ way, and contain the chaos a bit. Never underestimate the ability of a couple hundred developers (and users, POs, domain experts and so on) for creating chaos. The fight is real. BTW, I was once nicknamed Dr. No.

smokel 2y ago

> I've yet to see any form of measured example where architectural work actually provided a measurable net benefit for an organisation though. These things are hard to measure, but I've seen too much of the reverse as well: over-enthusiastic developers with no feel for the customer, no understanding of the domain, and no shared vision, but perfectly happy to ruin a codebase. Especially in the field of having a shared vision, I think a good architect can do wonders. I tend to see an architect as a multiplier for success. A good one has value above 1, the experiences you shared might have resulted in a negative one. Edit: actually read the article, and boy do I agree with your sentiment now :)

rbanffy 2y ago
I'd go as far as to say good architecture is an invisible enabler. You don't think about the work that went inside Ruby on Rails to structure its functionality in a way Rails developers find productive and comfortable. At the same time, another kind of architect, Oscar Niemeyer, has a good reputation between those who admire his works, and a very different one (sometimes good, but often terrible) from those who have to live and work in his buildings. Architects of all kinds walk the thin line between elegance and practicality.
Quothling 2y ago
I agree with everything you say. My personal issue is that I've very rarely seen the difference in impact by having full time architects. It's obviously very anecdotal, but in my experience, you can get both good and bad architecture regardless of it being governed by specialized architects or regular developers. I think the scale may even tip in the developers favour. It's probably important to point out that almost every Danish organisation is fairly tiny, even well past the startup phase. With that in mind, I'd always prefer a "regular" developer because they'll not bog things down with stuff like this article suggests. > Edit: actually read the article, and boy do I agree with your sentiment now :) Exactly, all I read was that I'd be spending even more of my time in useless meetings.
- hakunin 2y ago
  It's really hard to be a good architect, because their job is not supposed to be to leave their mark. An architect is doing a great job when the codebase is boring, and everybody talks about business. That doesn't help the architect however, because people can't tell how it would've been had they not been there. "Our codebase is so simple and boring, why do we even need an architect". That's how you get the kind of architects that try to look impressive to the management. There are a few things a business can do to get a good kind of architect. 1. Hire them to be hands on with code (give them secondary features or refactors, not major lifts, since shipping speed is not the priority). 2. Don't give them authority over devs, rather ask them to provide mentorship and demos. Their job is to excite devs about a clearly better approach, not to force their opinion. 3. Encourage devs to come to the architect for advice as needed. 4. Have the architect organize long term refactors[1] when needed. Basically make them a developer whose audience is other developers, and the product of their work is developer buy-in/excitement over good practices and software design directions. [1]: https://max.engineer/long-term-refactors https://max.engineer/long-term-refactors

jph 2y ago

Some large public examples of where software architectural work provides a large benefit: 1. Amazon all-in on API service architecture thus creating Amazon Web Services. 2. Sun all-in on attempting run-anywhere architecture thus creating the Java Virtual Machine. 3. Facebook all-in on PHP single-page rendering architecture thus creating HipHop. 4. Linus all-in on Unix x86 architecture thus creating Linux, then all-in on distributed versioning architecture thus creating Git. 5. Google all-in on horizontal scale architecture thus creating Bigtable, MapReduce, Kubernetes, etc. 6. Apple all-in on vertical device architecture thus creating Apple Silicon, iPod/iPhone, physical stores, etc. 7. Hashicorp all-in on infrastructure as code architecture thus creating Terraform, Vault, etc. 8. 37signals all-in on convention-over-configuration MVC web app architecture thus creating Ruby on Rails. 9. NVIDIA all-in on GPUs thus creating CUDA and enabling matrix math speedups of many programs.

lucianbr 2y ago

> architects should be replaced by a competent employee who will do actual work To me this sounds like "police should be replaced with citizens not breaking the law". It would be great, except it's impossible.