Me on Architects

“Trust me that looks good, I'm an architect!!!”

— Any pretentious architect, or any for that matter

I've been often asked very stupid strange question:

"Should architects write a code?"

Should father take care of his child as deeply as possible? Should surgeons operate? Should Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel be aware of principles of physics for analysis, design, manufacturing, and maintenance of his great engine?

Let me tell you something here. See, in IT world, actually, there is no such thing as "architect". There are software engineers. Some of them are so serious about software, that they're building their own hardware.

So what does they do? They do know what to expect from some certain hardware. They do also know how their and related software works and what to expect. They also do everything actually, hands on. Just close your eyes and imagine a senior architect of any (nuclear) submarine, just has no idea about very details in the machine room or navigation system and does not getting how it all works, what to expect from certain modules and what these little things does in different places inside the submarine. Remembering that everybody else will simply follow the instructions of such senior architect, how far this submarine will go, you think?..

However, all times in IT there are plenty of parasites like in my example above. Typically, they are heatseekers and speaks damn really a lot of buzzwords or (recently) simply abbreviations (often they turn to change a topic, if you ask about one some specific details). Since they say a bunch of cryptic words, everybody else thinks: "Oh, he is a God!". No, he is not. Not at all.

They mostly spending their time on (useless) meetings, making them as long as possible and as much as they can per a day: to blah-blah-blah is much easier than type-type-type-compile. Instead to code, they do prefer to draw boxes and join them with arrows in some drawing software or (better) on a board in front of those, who thinks he/she is a God. On top of this, they mostly have zero of real hands on experience. More advanced parasites can work only on prototypes and usually they deadly sticking exclusively to one single technology, making no steps forward to look around. One will bluntly repeat you: "Perl! Perl! Perl! Perl! Perl!", another: "Java! Java! Java! Java! Java!", yet another: ".Net! .Net! .Net! .Net! .Net!" and so on and so forth.

In real life, especially when company is big, they will avoid any real full-scale coding participation, but will switch to paperwork and e-mail broadcasting. More advanced will try to give a born to simply CGI scripts or similar prototyping.

Why it happens so? Obviously, because they are too dumb to learn something new, hence they do have ZERO CLUE what is going around and how industry is trying to break the walls. Thus they do not know current problems and are not passionate to SOLVE them once and forever, simply because they are not really a geeks. Therefore, as a consequence, only what they can do apart of saying abstract incomplete "just ideas", they WILL do dirty politics things, disturb real engineers with brain-less directives and environment changes, will go write [useless] documents with a stupid injunctions, make moronic rules, release crazy instructions, do not care about company, but simply suck money as much as possible, fill their LinkedIn.com profile with best recommendations from their friends they drinking with and then disappear, moving to another victim company.

But the company will continue to live with completely brainless bullshit solutions that are quite useless or in real full-scale enterprise. So if you are employer and someone call himself/herself "trained architect" and "prefer to design, rather to implement" — simply avoid such candidate as soon as you can, no matter what his BranBench results and a bunch of other certificates/diplomas says.

Shortly: either you provide or you are politician.

Have a good day!