The name plate on my desk says "Software Architect", and honestly I feel kind of silly repeating that when people ask what I do. I usually just tell them 'I wr

The name plate on my desk says "Software Architect", and honestly I feel kind of silly repeating that when people ask what I do. I usually just tell them 'I write software'. That said, I've worked in a bunch of different C#/.Net/SQL Server shops (IT depts, educational, shrink wrap apps, advertising), and I can see in some of these places why the role can be necessary. Not because .Net demands these over-architected enterprise uber-solutions, but because a large amount of developers in those places just don't seem to care about what technology choices and design methodologies are out there. And there's nothing wrong with that, so long as there are some there who are thinking beyond the next sprint, regardless of what their job title is officially. I'm also pretty sure the role itself means different things depending on the scale of what the company is doing. At my current job (a recruitment advertising company w/ some very large clients), we have a lot of traffic and only moderate development resources in-house, so you really need to depend on proven technologies to prevent the whole thing from falling apart. So part of my job is making sure we are using the right technology where we need to and only rolling our own when it makes sense.