The senior architect syndrome
I’m sure that many people have dealt with this sort. It’s that older smug bastard who enjoys having his finger in every pie. The kind of guy who does nothing all day beyond maintain some production system in the name of work. The guy who believes in pictures and diagrams and believes that the way forward is by farting out endless white papers and ‘visionary’ ideas.
What exactly is the point of these people? What is even more baffling is why on earth they’re tolerated. Now, incompetent engineers I can understand. You simply beat them when they misbehave and through the miracle of Pavlovian training, they improve with time. At worst, they learn to stop being harmful and just stumble along on a reassuringly mediocre path. They don’t even need to be paid that much, and they’re as disposable as a Bic razor. Best of all, most of them don’t even realise their position in life and are convinced they’re special, unique, and talented, so their egos don’t need pampering either.
The senior visionary though is a completely baffling role. These people do literally nothing. They’re immediately derisive of any new technology that did not originate within the dusty cobweb ridden corners of their cavernous empty minds.
How the hell do you deal with these people? They often have the admiration of their equally retarded and brain damaged managers. Managers with the power to insist that their pet visionary be invited to every technical discussion regardless of whether said visionary has the slightest clue. Said visionary however will not shy away from raising irrelevant issues and generally making a pest of themselves.
The delusions of grandeur that these people suffer from are quite astounding. As surprising as it might be, bringing a system into production 3 years ago and have been babysitting it since then does NOT, contrary to popular belief, mean that you’re talented, competent, or anything worth listening to. Just because you’ve had an architect role in some project does not make you an architect for life. One achievement is not sufficient for a lifetime of glory. So, do your fellow engineers a favour and stay the fuck out of their meetings!
November 10th, 2003 at 11:00 am
Hani,
Have a bad day? Or do you just have to now write a bunch of extra, over-functional code?
November 10th, 2003 at 11:01 am
Any examples, Hani?
November 10th, 2003 at 11:53 am
The best strategy I’ve come up with is to ignore them. Given their positions, they rarely have any actual power, beyond making the managers feel good that things are being done “in the proper manner”. The key point is that this sort is never going to take the time to actually look at your code, so if you successfully ignore them they make no difference. But you _do_ have to be prepared to have your time wasted occasionally by meetings w/ them, not all of which can be avoided….
November 10th, 2003 at 12:04 pm
Ahh, you’re just jealous. ;)
November 10th, 2003 at 12:16 pm
Man Hani you’ve just described a few fellows I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I usually refer to them as the powerpoint architects. Once they reach that prestigious position their managerial counterparts impress upon them the power of MS Project and MS PowerPoint. And from then on their productivity restricted to and directly proportional to the number of power point documents they produce.
Contrary to you overall sentiment though they have value in client communications hence their prestigious position and elevated salary. Hopefully theyll retain some of the programmer in them and are able to meaningfully discuss requirements with clients and limit scope to what is needed. But in terms of actual design and implementation other than some cute blue, yellow, and green boxes on a powerpoint document they should stay as you say stay the fuck out. They are often so out of touch that their knowledge has degraded to exactly that, abstract geometric shapes on some document . Bear in mind Im in no way referring to UML that would be a bit too involved and most likely beyond their capabilities.
November 10th, 2003 at 12:47 pm
People like this need to be killed. The problem is that they spend their effort convincing their boss that they are awesome and doing a good job, and most managers find it easier to believe them than to actually check out what they are doing and allegedly delivering.
And the correct term for them is “markitechs”
November 10th, 2003 at 1:07 pm
Wah! People like this can certainly be annoying, but they do serve a purpose. Remember, they are the ones with the experience. Presumably, they help steer younger coders around unforseen pitfalls. If nothing else, they help bring a consistant philosphy to the overall architecture that makes the whole system more maintainable, if a little out of date. Whithout them, coders tend to either treat every request as an opportunity to create a one-off solution, or the over integrate everything in the name of a level of code re-use that stiffles the projects. The best solution is generally a comprimise, which is where they help.
November 10th, 2003 at 1:25 pm
I’ve worked with one of these types…but, I had the added pleasure as the person in question was a Microsoft DCOM wizard who came in, fixed some high-visibility crap written in VSStudio6, and enjoyed the back-slapping that ensued.
From then on, he was an “architect”, invited to J2EE meetings…and the fun began. I shit you not, the guy forced the J2EE developers to not only answer to they used Ant as a build tool, to state that he could write the same thing “as a batch file in about ten minutes”.
At which point, higher-ups decided to task us with officially ‘checking in’ to this possibility.
I don’t work there anymore, and I guess he’s still churning out a lot of PP presentations (no UML, he doesn’t know it), describing how the company should become “SOA” by utilizing more DCOM services…. One may expect that this guy would be preaching .NET, but he doesn’t know it and doesn’t want to learn…so he derides that with as much vigor as he does Java/J2EE/anything else he doesn’t understand.
Regarding how to deal with these types, I have no idea. I had thought that simply exposing their idiocy to the higher-ups would be sufficient, but those lessons never seemed to take….
November 10th, 2003 at 1:51 pm
glenn1you0, what you describe is the theory of senior architects. In reality, they are more often (almost always?) how they are described here. Decent tech leads, and having the implementation team create and own the architecture is almost always a better route than an Architect looking on down benignly from above at the lowly coders down in the pit.
November 10th, 2003 at 1:52 pm
Don’t sweat these types. Soon enough they’ll become benign entities; CIOs.
November 10th, 2003 at 2:02 pm
This can happen to any useful person who falls for the manageresque notion that in software development there can be a division of labor between the grand poobah thinkers and the menial doers. However well that might work in other fields, it’s a stupid notion in software development.
The right thing to do is to take anybody with the title “architect” and make them do useful, productive work at least 50% of the time. We are all, every one of us, capable of fountaining bullshit, especially when put in a position where that’s what we’re encouraged to do, where other people have to bear the pain of making our notions work in the real world.
Make your architects eat their own cooking, and they will rapidly become better cooks. Either that or they will leave to leech off of your competitors, which is almost as good.
November 10th, 2003 at 3:38 pm
Arrogance both in attitude and reaction are in general counter productive. Although I have to admit, it sometimes help to get the pressure down.
November 10th, 2003 at 8:39 pm
I think there is a related issue to this, the explosion in Job titles.
What is happening to the IT industry? Every 3 months the number of unique job titles in job sites seems to increase.
I mean ‘Search Engineer’, what does that mean to you? Someone who understands dictionary bitmaps and such? Nope, its someone who can diddle your meta tags to make it bubble to the top of search engine results.
Where is the commonsense in the industry? Isn’t capitalism supposed to result in a meritocracy? Why aren’t smart people rising to the top, and therefore increasing the median smartness in industry?
IT should be helping this, you can’t flash your tits at a computer ( in this context anyhew ), you cant buy a computer a beer or give it a copy of C&C generals. Why is the old boy network not dieing out but morphing into the old executive network.
There was a study some time ago that basically said that psychologically, the people in positions of power where generally the worst type to be there. Ie the macho pilot in a plumetting plane trying to be the hero rather than blindly follow procedure. Architects, Management, Excecutives all seem to fit into that idea, noone who is actually at the bottom of the pyramid has respect for those above them, they are just wrong.
November 11th, 2003 at 2:58 am
Hani, the XP poster-boy: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/83438
November 11th, 2003 at 3:40 am
Unfortunately, I’ve met (and I’m currently struggling with) incompetent engineers that are simply incapable of being trained or even following simple directions… For example, they happily write form input validation as JavaScript crap rather than server-side, despite being told otherwise several times. If I have my say, they will never work with us anymore, no matter how cheap they might be.
November 11th, 2003 at 5:34 pm
Man, It feels like you are part of my organization.
November 12th, 2003 at 6:53 pm
Sheer misery : Being part of a team with 2 dumb-wit 1/2 ass “architects” (1 from client side) , 2 underpaid overworked developers and 1 tester.
November 13th, 2003 at 9:46 am
They are there to serve several functions:
1. Interpret techno-speak to executives.
2. Draw pretty diagrams and whitepapers for executives, marketing, and sales teams to throw about.
3. Counter-balance young engineers who lean too forward.
I think I quality as a senior architect given the depth and breadth of my experiences, but I still haven’t given up the joy of frolicking in the crap I design to get the kinks out of it. Unfortunately, I frequently find myself taking the path of least-resistance which doesn’t leave much room for iterative design process.
November 14th, 2003 at 4:50 pm
Might I suggest renting a backhoe and..um…eliminating your problem…
November 15th, 2003 at 1:11 pm
Hani’s description of the ‘architect’ is not as worrying as the fact that he seems to suggest that using a picture or diagram is a bad thing. If more coders would actually take a pad of paper and a pencil and draw out how they plan to do things, we wouldn’t be wallowing in such a huge pile of pathetic code.
Instead they just sit in front of their screens, open their IDE and start their pathetic attempts to create a system that will pay vague lip service to whatever ‘pattern’ Sun and TheServerSide.com are peddling this month.
Possibly the worst thing the ‘architect’ has ever done is make the ‘engineer’ [bloody stupid term] think that they don’t have to do architecture.
Hani seems to mainly be complaining about old people.
November 15th, 2003 at 1:39 pm
Here’s an interesting link on the topic:
http://www.martinfowler.com/ieeeSoftware/whoNeedsArchitect.pdf
December 19th, 2003 at 7:23 am
Whatafuckingnazinerdthing!!!
December 21st, 2003 at 3:17 pm
what is that?
December 24th, 2003 at 12:38 pm
At our company, they have all been put in one group called Enterprise Architecture. There they have been formulating a “vision” for the future of all systems development, for about 3 years now. For a while, all was well and we could proceed with our projects in peace. Now however the tide has turned, and all projects have to be “approved” against their still-to-be-published vision. Lets just say, there will be no further innovation at our company. Its no wonder that half of our projects now go to India based consulting companies, that can bypass the vision.