>But if a company the size of Google can get by without software architects, why does your company need to be organized in such a way that you require that role?
I have a few notes here:
0. Google maybe is exception. But i never worked in google, so i don't know how good it is really.
1. Not all companies can pay same wages and get same talent as Google
2. Every time there is talks about GCP/AWS/Azure a lot of people say that all of those services seems to designed by completely different people and don't mesh together nicely.
3. I worked in one of the FAANGS , and while it's widely known for it's excellent engineering it was a massive dumpster fire. There were excellent people that did amazing things on lower infra level, but in the moment that you move a bit higher up it was disorganized mess of multiple teams not knowing how to collaborate properly what resulted in outages, sometimes rather big, which were not noticed from outside mostly due to size of production environments that allowed to shift users to still functioning parts of the system. Those outages were mostly result of not having somebody who will look at system end to end and will identify potential cascading failures or weak points in general.
>BOTH Musk and Ford knew how to weld, and considered that knowledge essential to being able to do their jobs. Sure, they didn't do a lot of welding day to day. But how could they make correct decisions about how to build new machines if they didn't know how those machines are put together?
I didn't say that I don't know how to code. I said that I won't pass coding interview. Companies that I work in have coders much better than me, but I am much better than them in understanding how system supposed to work end to end and how to prevent it from collapsing under various unpleasant scenarios.
I did work at Google, and their engineering architecture is insanely good. Their product design, not so much. Both aspects are visible when you use their site.
I acknowledge that Google is able to hire incredible people. They also got a lucky break in hiring Jeff Dean early. However it is my considered belief that when you call Google an exception, you're reversing cause and effect. When people who come up with the architecture have to write code, work with their system, and see from experience what is wrong with it, they produce better architectures.
It is not whether coding produces more value than architecture. It is that continuing to code informs their architectural decisions.
For a similar idea in a very different industry, when Robert Townsend was CEO of Avis back in the 1960s he turned the company around. He made it profitable, and made it grow.
One of the things he did that he says made a huge difference was to make it a rule that everyone worked the rental desk. Didn't matter whether you were the CEO, VP, big manager or whatever. One day a month you stood behind the rental desk and had to deal with live customers. And having that regular experience meant that problems in the organization that would otherwise go missed became instantly visible. Just like how actually having to code and debug things in your architecture makes architecture problems visible that otherwise you'd discount. It made Robert Townsend a better CEO. The corresponding exercise would make you a better architect.
It seems to me that in most organisation, the equivalence to 'rental desk' is facing the customer, not having to write some code. So we should be taking developers/architects/etc. and bringing them to interact with end users.
Unfortunately it's not always possible. I worked on OSS [0] for telecoms. Consumers of OSS are dozens of different teams across telecom. No telecom company will externalize those end users to vendors. The best you can get is meeting with with "enterprise architects" who collected requirements from all the teams and wrote RFI to which, if you answered good enough, you will be granted in person meeting to explain them better how your stuff is working.
>I acknowledge that Google is able to hire incredible people. They also got a lucky break in hiring Jeff Dean early. However it is my considered belief that when you call Google an exception, you're reversing cause and effect. When people who come up with the architecture have to write code, work with their system, and see from experience what is wrong with it, they produce better architectures.
Totally agree with this. I personally started with installing trumpet winsock and netscape navigator on win3.11. I did customer support while been developer. I went through most of positions that are usually part of software development org and dealt with with most aspects of software. And I consider myself lucky to been able to do so.
But the unfortunate truth it's that in majority of companies that develop software (lets get outside of silicone valley for a moment), developers tend to be very far removed from production environments and from clients. As example, I was hired to work on a new, from scratch product, in one of biggest suppliers of software for telecoms (8B in sales). Over there "core engineering" was tasked with developing "core functionality" and there were totally separate delivery organization that will take this code and adapt it to client needs and will write installers/deployment systems, figure out how it actually integrate, run, etc. Clients weren't accessible to core engineering and internal product management couldn't talk to them either.
Also, the overall approach was that it's perfectly normal that software will crash and leave everything in inconsistent mess, hence there were mandatory tooling to be developed for manual operation to "fix things".
I spent first few months arguing with my boss that it's not normal and that we must deliver software that can be installed and work without crashing left and right. I got to built first devops org in company, first private cloud lab, pretty much first in company integrated ci/cd, jira+confluence (because company used internally developed "agile" tools that were unusable. and i actually got visit from internal auditors questioning me why we spent money on something that already exists in company), lobby to create track for engineers to interact with clients so they will understand what is real operational environment of software they are writing and what are the real requirements so they will be able to do better job, get training for developers so they will learn that there is something outside of "enterprise java" (as anecdote, when i presented rabbitmq as part of architecture, i got asked to what java standard it corresponds and when i said to none, i was told that they don't really understand why would I use it). Project was amazing success and delivered more in less time than was common in the company. (manager got fast tracked to vp/svp/gen manager overseeing 2B in business within 4 years. I got relocation to states :).
my point i guess, it's that most of software development in most companies is disorganized mess with developers been completely detached from realities production environments. And when I am hired, pardon the pathos, my job is to bring order into the chaos or light into the darkness or whatever. In cases when I am out of my depth in some areas (i well aware about limitations of my knowledge) , i usually have enough pull to hire some domain specialists that I can outsource to them designs/implementation.
In other words you're saying that "software architect" exists as a role in these organizations because bad organizational structures create problems that it is a band-aid for.
And I'm saying that the band-aid doesn't work that well, and you do better if you fix the organizational structure to not need it. And furthermore, as a developer, those organizations are no fun to be in and you can't pay me enough to want to deal with them. Particularly not when I have the option of finding better organizations to be in.
Which adds to the problem. When good developers choose not to be in your company because your company is a disaster for developers, you don't get good developers. Which reinforces the idea that developers aren't that good, and causes them to try to put guard-rails around developers to prevent the problems that bad ones cause. Thereby creating a negative reinforcement cycle.
Good point, architect is indeed compensating function that comes to cover for many deficiencies in organization. Those deficiencies are:
. Developers that are mature but lack proficiency because they don't care about software development
. Inexperienced developers that lack, well, experience to make proper designs
. Absence of domain specific knowledge when company tries to shift it's technological gears or switch to new domain/market all together
. Problems in communication and planning between dozens of teams/services that build together 1 product that must work in unison perfectly, yet it's hard for each team to know architecture/plans of all of the other teams and properly consider it during development
. Absence of ability to see "the big picture" by individual teams and take it properly into consideration
. Just a general jack of all trades that will compensate for bad product/project/program management, will establish proper processes, etc.
As part of this you occasionally can revamp organizational structure and leave company in much better shape, but it requires a lot of work that you, as architect have no authority to do :)
> And furthermore, as a developer, those organizations are no fun to be in and you can't pay me enough to want to deal with them
One of my last jobs was in company that I literally sweared to never work for. They gave me a shiny title, 50% raise of already top salary in industry that I had, yet what really sealed the deal was manager who wanted to try to do something new. Even though it was at times horror show, at the end of the day it was probably most fulfilling position that I had due to a sheer volume of things that I managed to change. And we also delivered totally new product, first in industry beating all the competition to market, including companies that were supposed to be market leaders in this area.
>Which adds to the problem. When good developers choose not to be in your company because your company is a disaster for developers, you don't get good developers.
The issue is that really good developers are rare. Developers that you can delegate to them and sleep well at night are a rare commodity on the market. I been working in dev for 25 years, both in startups and in established companies and I maybe know only dozen of people like this. Unfortunately, most of the developers on the market are in it only for money and don't really care about what they are doing.
Also, as anecdote, at this ^ job place that I described, in order to work around bad reputation of the company I suggested to create daughter company with a different name that will be operated independently in a different location in order to try to get better developers. We were a few steps away from closing on office lease before management bailed out because they were afraid that it will upset employees of the company
To the deficiencies that you list, I have to say that your organizational structure can create better developers, or make them worse. Delegating all responsibility for the bigger picture to architects and hiding developers from those issues will make them worse. On the reverse, I admit that not every developer can learn to do architecture well. But when you enable developers to take those responsibilities, the ones who are capable of it will step up.
My rule of thumb for developers goes like this. I mentally divide developers into junior, mid-level and senior. This has nothing to do with their titles. The breakdown is that a junior developer is still learning basic programming consistency and good habits. They generally struggle on programs that go over a couple of thousand lines. A mid-level developer has internalized consistency but is unable to remain aware of the big picture while focusing on details. They tend to top out and struggle at 10k-20k line projects. A senior developer is aware of the big picture while dealing with details, and remembers details while dealing with the big picture. They tend to top out around 200k line projects. And a principal software engineer adds an awareness of subtleties about how the big picture is likely to evolve, and how to guide that in a long-term positive way. These people can manage architectures in the millions of lines.
On this scale, I rate myself senior. To move to the next level, I'd need to spend more time at large companies with very large codebases. But dealing with the associated politics is not my preference so I'm happy where I am.
The issue is that really good developers are rare. Developers that you can delegate to them and sleep well at night are a rare commodity on the market. I been working in dev for 25 years, both in startups and in established companies and I maybe know only dozen of people like this.
Judging by what I saw of environments with software architects as a role, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this.
However I know a heck of a lot more than a dozen programmers that I consider good like that. OK, throw out top-notch organizations like Google, and just go for relatively small companies that I've worked at. Let's narrow it farther and just do places that I've worked in the last 10 years. I still have no problem getting past a dozen.
Why? Because I choose to work at organizations where software architecture is owned by developers. With other developers who have made the same choice.
(Incidentally, 3 of those programmers were co-founders at ZipRecruiter. Who hired a lot of mutual acquaintances on my list, then grew to be a billion dollar company. Somehow I don't think that this is coincidence.)
I most definitely enable developers to take responsibilities. I don't want to do more then what I need to do. I also prefer to help developers grow and take more responsibility, as it makes my life easier.
BTW, principal software engineer in many places == architect. Titles are very country dependent, company dependent. When startup where I worked was bought by US company I became principal. When I was acquired by German, I was retitled... don't even remember to what.
>Judging by what I saw of environments with software architects as a role, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this.
I wasn't always working in companies that had this title. Yet, this still remains true. Also we may have different standards and operate in different environment on different types of products :)
I have a few notes here:
0. Google maybe is exception. But i never worked in google, so i don't know how good it is really.
1. Not all companies can pay same wages and get same talent as Google
2. Every time there is talks about GCP/AWS/Azure a lot of people say that all of those services seems to designed by completely different people and don't mesh together nicely.
3. I worked in one of the FAANGS , and while it's widely known for it's excellent engineering it was a massive dumpster fire. There were excellent people that did amazing things on lower infra level, but in the moment that you move a bit higher up it was disorganized mess of multiple teams not knowing how to collaborate properly what resulted in outages, sometimes rather big, which were not noticed from outside mostly due to size of production environments that allowed to shift users to still functioning parts of the system. Those outages were mostly result of not having somebody who will look at system end to end and will identify potential cascading failures or weak points in general.
>BOTH Musk and Ford knew how to weld, and considered that knowledge essential to being able to do their jobs. Sure, they didn't do a lot of welding day to day. But how could they make correct decisions about how to build new machines if they didn't know how those machines are put together?
I didn't say that I don't know how to code. I said that I won't pass coding interview. Companies that I work in have coders much better than me, but I am much better than them in understanding how system supposed to work end to end and how to prevent it from collapsing under various unpleasant scenarios.