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I think of it this way. Software architecture can not be taught. (This is not particularly uncommon, and so not a claim to being particularly special.) But you

by jerf 5mo ago

I think of it this way. Software architecture can not be taught. (This is not particularly uncommon, and so not a claim to being particularly special.) But you can sensitize people to the problems they will encounter and solutions they should consider. You can't "teach" someone into being a software architect of 10 "software architecture goodness units", but you can accelerate the rate at which they accumulate SAGUs by doing this. In fact, per my parethetical, honestly I would say most things work like this. You can't just pluck people up and drop them five or ten years down the road of experience for nearly anything. What you can do is give them a car and show them the road rather than letting them hack through a jungle with a machete and no map. One of my major criticisms of how we teach is that for the most part everyone in the system operates in the belief that we can just stand in front of people and say things for a few hundred hours and they will be magically equipped with completed and refined skills after that process. Too much focus on trying to drop people into some mythical state of "educated" rather than accelerating them through their own journey. A journey that can be highly guided and structured for sure, but where you understand that for all you can clear the road you can't actually take steps for the student. "It is also subtraction: removing unnecessary abstraction, ceremony, cleverness, and control." This reminds me of one of the most distinct menaces to software architecture I encounter on a regular basis, the person who follows Hexagonal Design or Clean Architecture or MVC or some other Answer To All Architecture, rigorously following it to the letter and insisting that any system that doesn't follow the Answer To All Architecture is prima facie a bad system that needs immediate redesign to bring it into conformance with the ATAA. The "answer" to something as complicated as software architecture doesn't fit in a book. In fact it doesn't even fit in a human head; for all the experience I have in network servers I wouldn't expect to be able to sit down and architect a high-performance game engine that could compete in the marketplace. I have ideas about how to do it, sure, but I know that I don't know all the details that people who operate in that space do, and plenty of those details will matter. No one has the breadth of experience to truly tell us all how to architect software, under all circumstances and conditions. Anyone de facto operating as an architect needs to bear that in mind, and while consulting the prior experience is part of that "be in a car on a road and not hacking through a jungle", the supposed set of blessed answers must always be mediated through the task in front of you and not vice versa.

mplanchard 5mo ago
It’s tangential to your point, which I agree with completely, but this is also exactly why I get so frustrated with the idea that higher education is about acquiring job skills. Ideally, regardless of major, a university teaches you how to think, critically and deeply, and how to learn. If you have those things, job skills are easy to pick up, but instead we treat college like an RPG skill tree, where you’ve got to put points into your intended career path in order to unlock the skills you’ll need to do the job. Edit: although I do think university focus is important for subjects that are less about job skills and more about knowledge synthesis, such as most sciences, critical analysis, and so on, if you intend to not just do a job but contribute to the overall knowledge base of the field.
- woodydesign 5mo ago
  I also quite resonate with the structural dilemma of modern education system. Learning should be life-long experience. And learning cannot separate with practicing, it's two sides of ONE process. Two quotes I am keep revisit when I learn: “To LEARN, and to PRACTICE what you learned at the RIGHT time, and from time to time, isn't that JOY indeed?” - Confucius “Many have remarked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune
- 9rx 5mo ago
  > a university teaches you how to think, critically and deeply, and how to learn. You'd have to have lived a pretty sheltered life to not have picked up those things long before reaching the typical age of attending university. University's role is to give you a place to apply those qualities to subjects where you otherwise wouldn't have access to the necessary resources to fulfill your interest in the subject, like where you need equipment that costs many figures beyond what a personal budget could ever dream of. Which is also where the job skill conflation comes from as those same resources are often used to fulfil job training, like where one needs to learn how a certain costly machine works before messing with the real thing in industry.

by jerf 5mo ago

mplanchard 5mo ago

It’s tangential to your point, which I agree with completely, but this is also exactly why I get so frustrated with the idea that higher education is about acquiring job skills. Ideally, regardless of major, a university teaches you how to think, critically and deeply, and how to learn. If you have those things, job skills are easy to pick up, but instead we treat college like an RPG skill tree, where you’ve got to put points into your intended career path in order to unlock the skills you’ll need to do the job. Edit: although I do think university focus is important for subjects that are less about job skills and more about knowledge synthesis, such as most sciences, critical analysis, and so on, if you intend to not just do a job but contribute to the overall knowledge base of the field.

woodydesign 5mo ago
I also quite resonate with the structural dilemma of modern education system. Learning should be life-long experience. And learning cannot separate with practicing, it's two sides of ONE process. Two quotes I am keep revisit when I learn: “To LEARN, and to PRACTICE what you learned at the RIGHT time, and from time to time, isn't that JOY indeed?” - Confucius “Many have remarked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune
9rx 5mo ago
> a university teaches you how to think, critically and deeply, and how to learn. You'd have to have lived a pretty sheltered life to not have picked up those things long before reaching the typical age of attending university. University's role is to give you a place to apply those qualities to subjects where you otherwise wouldn't have access to the necessary resources to fulfill your interest in the subject, like where you need equipment that costs many figures beyond what a personal budget could ever dream of. Which is also where the job skill conflation comes from as those same resources are often used to fulfil job training, like where one needs to learn how a certain costly machine works before messing with the real thing in industry.