Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Architects

For the past couple of months, the developers around here have been pretty anti-architect. It's not that we don't value what the role should be, it's just that the people in that position don't seem to do anything. As near as I can tell, they play around in PowerPoint all day and go to meetings. They're there to make upper management feel better by showing them that we have "experts" on staff. They don't actually solve any architectural problems. In the rare instances that they interact with developers they seem to just nod and say things like, "Ah, yes. SQL. Interesting. You could do it that way, I suppose. Yes." When they're not making asses of themselves in person they're writing articles about Egyptian magicians not knowing how to design software or some such shit. You know, things that are supposed to make me go, "Hmm."

Well, we filled out a survey for management as to how effective we thought the architects were in their role. The answers must have gotten someone's attention because for the first time ever, I've seen architects attending the daily status meetings as well as the iteration planning meeting. They still don't fucking contribute anything to the architecture of the product, but now at least they're present to try and sidetrack the meeting in a vain attempt to demonstrate some measure of technical competency. Is this an attempt to impress me or intimidate me? Because frankly I just find the whole thing sad. It can't be a good feeling coming to work every day scared that you're going to be exposed for being the fraud you are.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home