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Honest questions: How to become software architect? What are the relevant qualifications/industry standards? Can any current or past architects on HN share thei

by q2 12y ago

Honest questions: How to become software architect? What are the relevant qualifications/industry standards? Can any current or past architects on HN share their life experiences? Thanks.

slowmovintarget 12y ago
1) Read (a lot) and absorb quality writing on software development. For example Pragmatic Programmer, Code Complete, Designing Hard Software, SICP... 2) Create software (for about 10 years at least) for fun and profit. Assume others must read and understand your code. Write it for them. Also love the code you write. Find the beauty in solving problems elegantly and simply. You'll learn a lot. 3) Teach others how to create high-quality software, most especially focusing on "why". This keeps you thinking about what you're doing and leads to you finding ways to improve. 4) Listen and evaluate honestly when others criticize your choices. Maybe you did do it wrong or you don't have the whole picture. Have strong opinions, weakly held. 5) Repeat. These aren't qualifications so much as guidelines for when people ask me how I got "so good." My title has been "Software Architect" for the last twelve years. There's a lot more to it, naturally. Your biggest job as an architect is to extend the reach of the entire development team. Be it by writing libraries and frameworks for the project, mentoring developers, or creating designs and guidelines for developers to work within. Like a building architect, you are responsible for crafting and engineering the space in which people will live and work. For a software architect those people are the users, the developers, and the stakeholders. Your job is to strike the right balance between the three groups. The reason you see so many posts in this thread deriding software architects is that as an industry we have largely forgotten what software architecture is. B-School and CIO Magazine have been selling executives on out-sourcing so that they don't have to "worry" about that kind of thing (and we're just now recovering from this). Capital "A" Agile came along and sold them another bill-of-goods that doing Scrum would fix all the issues. For these and other reasons, the title basically came to mean "really good programmer" and was handed out as a simple promotion. But the real software architects are never just that. When doing their job properly, they become the foundation for excellent software development teams, and for excellent software.

by q2 12y ago

Honest questions: How to become software architect? What are the relevant qualifications/industry standards? Can any current or past architects on HN share their life experiences? Thanks.

slowmovintarget 12y ago

1) Read (a lot) and absorb quality writing on software development. For example Pragmatic Programmer, Code Complete, Designing Hard Software, SICP... 2) Create software (for about 10 years at least) for fun and profit. Assume others must read and understand your code. Write it for them. Also love the code you write. Find the beauty in solving problems elegantly and simply. You'll learn a lot. 3) Teach others how to create high-quality software, most especially focusing on "why". This keeps you thinking about what you're doing and leads to you finding ways to improve. 4) Listen and evaluate honestly when others criticize your choices. Maybe you did do it wrong or you don't have the whole picture. Have strong opinions, weakly held. 5) Repeat. These aren't qualifications so much as guidelines for when people ask me how I got "so good." My title has been "Software Architect" for the last twelve years. There's a lot more to it, naturally. Your biggest job as an architect is to extend the reach of the entire development team. Be it by writing libraries and frameworks for the project, mentoring developers, or creating designs and guidelines for developers to work within. Like a building architect, you are responsible for crafting and engineering the space in which people will live and work. For a software architect those people are the users, the developers, and the stakeholders. Your job is to strike the right balance between the three groups. The reason you see so many posts in this thread deriding software architects is that as an industry we have largely forgotten what software architecture is. B-School and CIO Magazine have been selling executives on out-sourcing so that they don't have to "worry" about that kind of thing (and we're just now recovering from this). Capital "A" Agile came along and sold them another bill-of-goods that doing Scrum would fix all the issues. For these and other reasons, the title basically came to mean "really good programmer" and was handed out as a simple promotion. But the real software architects are never just that. When doing their job properly, they become the foundation for excellent software development teams, and for excellent software.