But Where are All the Architect Positions?
ARCHITECT, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
I’m a faculty brat and have a certain idea of what it means to be a professor. Both of my parents are Mathematicians, so I thought that they did research largely on their own and occasionally mentored graduate students on their way to earning a Ph.D. When I met my wife, she was studying with the renowned spectroscopist Takeshi Oka. To me it seemed a very different way to be a professor — he had maybe a dozen post-docs and graduate students toiling away in labs — it just didn’t seem possible that he could also be involved with day-to-day research.
In fact he was very involved, spending time with each graduate student and post-doc, mentoring them and strongly influencing the quality and direction of the research. I’ve seen other professors over the years, in physics and in biochemistry, with much bigger labs, with dozens upon dozens of collaborators. Those professors are really just administrators, writing grants and managing office space and payrolls. Put a scientist in charge of a large organization and they cease being a scientist. As it turns out, I think Professor Oka had the size of his team — a dozen — about right. Just as in Agile software development, too large of a team becomes unwieldy and decreases productivity and quality.
So, what does this have to do with architects? Some people have asked me why we only advertise developer positions and no architect positions. First, I don’t believe in title inflation. “Architect” is most times another way of saying “senior senior developer.” Second, the software architect who ponders how to design applications and how they should be hooked up to an enterprise software ecosystem is a creature of the enormous corporation. I’ll concede that you may need one or two of these rarefied creatures in a company of tens of thousands, but not a department of dozens. I’ve seen that in action. That’s the sort of company that generates five year plans, runs their business like the Soviet Union did, and throws software products over the wall to more nimble acquisitions at the first opportunity.
So no, we don’t hire architects. We hire developers. In a small team, there is no room for management deadwood. Everybody pays their own freight. The more senior you are, the more you get to help and coach and mentor others. Leading means enabling others to do their job and make good decisions on their own, not cutting their food and handing off work.
If you’ve made the transition from a hierarchical environment to an agile, self-organizing team, you know what I’m saying. You won’t ever want to go back.
