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Disclosure: I've had an architect title for nearly a decade. I actually don't think half a day is nearly enough. BUT I also don't think that this needs to happen every week. Sometimes, there are periods of exploration and discovery - whether it be with new technology, new approaches within the company, or coming up with some more grand long-term vision to align the tech org towards. However, when you're out of discovery mode, you need to be in the weeds writing prolific code, feeling the impact (good or bad) of your decisions and course correcting as you go. Moreover, you need to see how other people are feeling about your decisions. At the end of the day, you're working in service of them, helping a team, teams, or the overall tech org to be successful, which in turn will (hopefully) help make the business successful. Often times when I hear disparaging stories about architects, they aren't fulfilling that tenet - either because they don't have the skill to do so or they believe everyone else just needs to keep up with their brilliance. I've been in too many situations where once the "architecture" was done, the project was to be tossed to some engineers while I work full time on something else. Unless you have some awesome leads that are in lock step with the architect, then that is a recipe for disaster. The last thing I'll say is that everyone writing code is an architect. You're inevitably making decisions about the way things will be built, no matter how small. Virtually all software has an architecture - but too often it's incidental architecture rather than intentional architecture. Make conscious decisions about your code, reflect on those decisions, and keep an open mind - whether you're just starting out or have decades of experience. |