[cek]

21 years at Microsoft led me to have great disdain for "Software Architects".

5 years at Amazon led me to fall in love with the concept of a community of Principal Engineers. The Amazon Principle Engineering tenets are amazeballs.

Exemplary Practitioner - Principal Engineers are hands-on and lead by example. We deliver artifacts that set the standard for engineering excellence, from designs to algorithms to implementations. Only by being close to the details can we earn the respect needed to be effective technical leaders.

Technically Fearless - Our company's startup culture does not admit the luxury of conservatism. Principal Engineers tackle intrinsically hard problems, venturing beyond comfortable approaches when necessary. We acquire expertise as needed, pioneer new spaces, and inspire others as to what’s possible.

Balanced and Pragmatic - Principal Engineers are pragmatic problem solvers. We apply judgment and experience to balance trade-offs between competing interests. We simplify processes and technologies while advocating a long-term view.

Illuminate and Clarify - Principal Engineers bring clarity to complexity and demonstrate smart ways to simplify. We frame each problem in its customer and business context and boil it down to its essence. We probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, and foster shared understanding. We accelerate progress by driving crisp and timely decisions.

Flexible in Approach - Principal Engineers adapt our approach to meet the needs of the team, project, and product. We solicit differing views and are willing to change our minds as we learn more. We recognize there are often many viable solutions, and that sometimes the best solution is to solve a different problem, or to not solve the problem at all.

Respect What Came Before - Principal Engineers are grateful to our predecessors. We appreciate the value of working systems and the lessons they embody. We understand that many problems are not essentially new.

Learn, Educate, and Advocate - Principal Engineers are constantly learning. We seek technical knowledge and educate the entire organization about trends, technologies, and approaches. We combine vision and discretion to drive fruitful and even game-changing technology choices.

Have Resounding Impact - “Deliver Results” is a low bar for a Principal Engineer. Without seeking the spotlight, Principal Engineers make a lasting impact that echoes through the technology, the product, and the company. We amplify our impact by aligning teams toward coherent architectural strategies.

[jayceedenton]

It's typical of engineering organisations to come up with this kind of list, the main reason being that as an industry we're uncomfortable with experience, seniority and progression. We're collectively suspicious of it. We want to codify and clarify it, endlessly. We demand the right to define it but when given the chance we always set the bar unrealistically high.

To recognise someone as a Principal Engineer, they should be definitively and objectively exceptional in every way, right? Their depth of knowledge in all technical areas is unmatched, they deliver innovation, domain knowledge, expert teaching and mentoring, strategic vision. They're growth hackers and also they design and deliver timeless systems and ever-green architectures. They're research scientists, and also inspiring leaders who (with no formal seniority) are able to align large groups of engineers via respect alone. How else can they be deserving? I wonder, does any other discipline in the org require this?

Whenever we come close to settling on a sensible way of recognising the value that experienced engineers (that are well connected to the domain and the business) can bring, it takes only a few years before that route is smashed by a new iconoclastic bunch of thought-leaders.

The parts of the org that are outside engineering now just let us get on with sabotaging ourselves.

[lmm]

> as an industry we're uncomfortable with experience, seniority and progression. We're collectively suspicious of it. We want to codify and clarify it, endlessly.

Are we wrong to? We've all had the experience of being held back by poor decisions from a senior person who simply didn't have the skill. I watched a 200-person company full of smart people single-handedly destroyed by a "software architect" who just made a lot of, frankly, stupid choices that all of the freshly-graduated engineers could see were stupid.

Frankly I've found the vast majority of "experienced engineers" aren't actually any better at their jobs than fresh grads. There should be very high, objective standards before we allow one person to overrule the rest of the organisation.

[lumost]

Bear in mind, an Amazon Principal Engineer is intended to be a 1 in 100 engineers position. The pay is generally above 600k, with the max pay dependent on the position.

[sokoloff]

In a field where the spread of outcomes is as wide as software, it seems reasonable that the right tail of practitioners would be very impressive.

In practice, no company requires their equivalent of principal engineer to hit 100.00% of the defined marks, but rather a comfortable majority of them with no glaring weaknesses.

Principal engineer roles should be filled on ability and impact not seniority/experience.

[ahupp]

I'm not familiar with Amazon, but the equivalent level at FB (according to levels.fyi) represents just 1% of engineering. So this isn't only "experience, seniority and progression", it represents something really unique.

It's hard to look at a list like this and say "oh I know what to do now", but it is useful as a rubric; is this person meeting most of the criteria? Just a few?

[username90]

Principal at Amazon is the first level above senior software engineer, so closer to staff than principal at Google/Facebook. It isn't a particularly uncommon level to reach at Facebook or Google.

[amzn-throw]

Principals at Amazon are 1.8% of the SDE population, so no, the comparison to "Staff" engineer is unfounded.

[username90]

Amazon is just more stingy with promotions.

[amzn-throw]

Yes, and so their "staff" engineers stay Sr. Engineers. Isn't that the same point I made?

[dominotw]

This is a bit too buzzwordy for me.

> Resounding Impact

> game-changing technology choices.

> aligning teams toward coherent architectural strategies.

> lead by example

> pioneer new spaces

> inspire others as to what’s possible.

> pragmatic problem solvers

> bring clarity to complexity

> illuminate pitfalls

> probe assumptions and foster shared understanding.

This perfectly illustrates why ppl dismiss software architects that they hide behind silly buzzwords without delivering anything tangible.

[digitalsushi]

It's corporate mythos. Something that worked for someone long long ago was so successful that it became the corporate form of a folk song.

When we down near the bottom hear "lead by example", it's facile to find the nearly useless obvious veneer to it, but if we could attach the original odyssey that led that engineer to tell their story ... we might agree with the lesson. But retellings upon retellings compress, simplify and gloss the original story into a cliche.

Each thing in this list sounds obvious, but if one can picture the opposite of the advice to be false, that reflection might actually lead an individual to growth.

[AnHonestComment]

That’s something Amazon does well:

Principal engineers are expected to give talks about their experience, which are heavily attended in person and widely shared.

It’s not perfect, but it’s less abstract when one or two concepts at a time, they explain why those truism through their personal experience.

“Earn Trust” is a truism — but being able to search for talks by the keyword “earn trust” where a high level engineer discusses different situations from their career and how they handled them is useful.

[nitrogen]

Can you think of more concrete language that applies equally to all organizations? If so please do share.

Sure, there are the Dilbert PHB-esque abuses of trendy lingo through mindless cargo culting. But the bigger and broader your goals, the more abstractly you have to describe them lest you end up writing a full-on textbook.

Having said that, I have to disagree that your examples are buzzwords. Buzzwords are usually contextless, like saying "synergistic impact" without any hint of what that means.

As just one example, "Probe assumptions" is not a buzzword. It has a clear meaning within the context of software engineering. For example it is often assumed by new grads starting a company that a startup just has to use Kubernetes and microservices. But that is an assumption that is worth probing. Horizontal scaling only becomes a bottleneck long after the millions of users point. Microservices are meant to help giant engineering teams isolate the things different teams work on, but in a startup with only one team you don't have that bureaucratic overhead in your org, so you probably don't need it in your code.

[dominotw]

> Microservices are meant to help giant engineering teams isolate the things different teams work on, but in a startup with only one team you don't have that bureaucratic overhead in your org, so you probably don't need it in your code.

We had these discussions many times on our team. Everyone understands that there are tradeoffs and "pitfalls" associated with any decision. Isn't this just normal rational thinking? Is your assumption that ppl that aren't principals don't consider pitfalls. Do non-principals employees really think that there are no pitfalls to using microservices.

[majormajor]

> Everyone understands that there are tradeoffs and "pitfalls" associated with any decision.

I haven't seen this to be true. Especially as companies get larger.

Sometimes it's because they really believe option A is better in every dimension than option B. (But often are mistaken.)

Sometimes it's because option A means their team has more work and can hire more people.

Sometimes it's because they understand their own ideas really well but aren't understanding other people's arguments.

Sometimes it's because they just don't respect the other people in the room.

But assuming that everyone is going to rationally jump initially to the thing that's best for the long-term health of the organization isn't something I've been able to count on.

[perlgeek]

I've seen many engineers reach for a microservice architecture by default.

Why? Because they read HN, reddit and lots of blog posts, and thought that's how you do things now if you start from scratch, no legacy architecture to consider.

Not everyone thinks this way, but it's a frighteningly common thing.

[nitrogen]

Is your assumption that ppl that aren't principals don't consider pitfalls.

No such assumption on my part. But it might be safe to assume that the better you are at questioning assumptions, avoiding pitfalls, and thinking of the big picture (think breadth-first vs depth-first traversal of the problem space), the more likely you are to advance to higher levels of responsibility.

Another example. Suppose you are adding a new field to your payment processing system. You have considered engineering pitfalls. How will that change affect other teams? What about other departments? Will Accounts Receivable suddenly have a 10x workload of invoices to chase because that field change wasn't considered in their workflow in all cases?

There's nothing magical about what senior vs staff vs principal vs whatever engineers do, it's the same skills amplified and applied to the benefit of many people across an org, rather than limited in scope and awareness to a single project.

[Person5478]

My experience is that people rationalize what they want. If they want microservices then you're going to get microservices.

It's not all nefarious, I think if many of them truly _UNDERSTOOD_ the difficulties of microservices it would give them pause (there's a difference between knowing and understanding), but they want what they want, they're optimistic, and they tend to back into the reasoning afterwards.

[dasil003]

That’s a junior mentality. There’s nothing more dangerous to a resource constrained startup than a highly talented engineer who thinks this way.

[nick_kline]

There was one key entry there, actually coding. Non-coding architects are rife with the possibility (but not certainty) of being too disconnected from the reality of the systems they are working on.

[shagie]

This reminds me of the discussions back on wiki.c2.com of https://wiki.c2.com/?ArchitectsDontCode and https://wiki.c2.com/?ArchitectsPlayGolf

There's also https://wiki.c2.com/?NonCodingArchitectsSuck for a rant.

[tomc1985]

I guess Principal Engineers are also really good at corporate bullshit speak

[sjburt]

These seem like totally different roles. And the hours I've spent staring at the AWS console trying to figure whether I need "Elastic Beanball3" says to me that Amazon could use maybe just a little architecture. But I'm sure the Beanball Principal Engineer is quite proud of their resounding impact.

[commandlinefan]

> trying to figure whether I need "Elastic Beanball3"

Just wait until you have to try to figure out how much that's going to cost you...

[sokoloff]

As far as I can tell, the state of the art is to run it for a month and see what the bill is.

[Geminidog]

The console is a UX/UI issue, not a "architectural" one. Most "architects" nowadays are just mere users of what was built by the engineers and principal engineers of amazon.

[otabdeveloper4]

AWS services don't mesh nice with each other, and the reason "software architecture" exists in the first place is so that disparate teams and technologies play nice with each other.

[Geminidog]

The disparity within AWS is the result of common inevitability that arises with managing technology built on over a decade of scaffolding. For sure there is a central planner within the company trying his best to put everything together into a cohesive whole. Technical debt is the most common name for this issue.

An "Architect" can't solve this problem anymore than an "Engineer" can fix the problem of technical debt because neither person can see the future. It's like pointing at everything wrong with a piece of technology and saying an "Architect" could've fixed that in hindsight.

"Architects" are not the solution to technical design and technical debt.

An engineering manager can place all engineers in a room and ask them to come up with an "architecture" that is the same if not better than anything a single "Architect" can come up with, and this "Architecture" will never solve the problem of technical debt for the same reason why we can't predict stock prices.

[otabdeveloper4]

Technical debt isn't the root or even the most common cause of software components not playing nice with each other.

In fact, this problem is probably more prevalent in greenfield over-engineered solutions than old legacy-ridden ones.

(And really much of what we call "technical debt" is just the scaffolding we put together over the years to make stuff be compatible.)

[webmaven]

> In fact, this problem is probably more prevalent in greenfield over-engineered solutions than old legacy-ridden ones.

Yup. In that context, it is usually called Second System Syndrome (when discussing the person that is laboring under it's influence while in the act of designing) or Second System Effect (when discussing the resulting system):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

[Geminidog]

I think if you ask, most anecdotal evidence from people who have worked with architects shows that companies with "software architects" don't necessarily have less "technical debt" then companies without.

Theoretically, those "software architects" would put a stop to "over-engineered" solutions, but why do these companies still have technical debt?

Most likely because technical debt is not solely just "over engineered" solutions.

[taeric]

Hard disagree. Thinking you can separate form from function is the evergreen mistake of our industry.

[Geminidog]

But you can. The separation is critical to the entire computing industry. The entire reason why higher level programming languages exist is to separate the form (assembly) from function.

Usually there are "costs" to doing this and much engineering work is done to reduce this cost as much as possible. Either way, what you say is categorically wrong. Separating form and function is not a "mistake" given that it is so fundamental to the entire industry.

[taeric]

Ah, but I would argue those are better described as form and function being part of the designs. Done wholistic, it is why the new apple hardware is able to take some very impressive gains.

You can argue that some interfaces are separate products from the services. I agree with that. But each has its design and each is targeted on form and function to something.

That is, you don't separate them. You make a new product, that has its own form and function.

[Geminidog]

My remark is based on what you said. You called the separation of form and function a "mistake" and I said this is categorically wrong. My statement still stands, you have not addressed it.

I neither agree or disagree with your remark about "Wholistic" designs but your example is extremely inapt.

The entire MacOS is programmed using a an interface separate from function. If they didn't program the Operating system in a higher level language that can be compiled into separate architectures then the move to ARM would be an even more complex engineering maneuver. The entire reason why Apple was able to move to new hardware without completely rewriting the software is because Form and Function are separated.

[GoblinSlayer]

UI can only show stuff in different place, with different colors and fonts, but it won't solve the problem. Explaining architectural purpose of a tool is an architectural job, neither UI designer nor salesman can do it, especially salesman.

[Geminidog]

There’s a concept in CS called an abstraction layer and the UI can literally change the thing underneath. I can create a UI with one button that when you press the button it triggers 50 actions to happen. It is not just about moving fonts and colors. This the exact same thing that a programming language does. A programming language abstracts away assembly language by having one programming expression execute several assembly commands. This is the job of abstraction layers and also the job of UI/UX.

Second explaining architecture is not solely an architectural job. It’s mainly the job of the person who writes documentation. The “architects” job is pretending he knows some “theory” of architecture more then the engineers actually coding the “architecture” when no such “theory” even exists.

[GoblinSlayer]

Then architect should tell the purpose of the tool to the documentation writer, otherwise the documentation will read "press Ok button to install %toolname%" that tells nothing how to decide what the tool is and does and whether the user needs this tool. That's the problem at hand.

[Geminidog]

This isn't specifically the job of the architect. Any idiot can explain how the tool they built works. So the software engineer or the product manager can do this as well. Explaining how something works is not a magical skill reserved for software architects.

What is a skill reserved for architects? If you find yourself spending 100% of your time creating a powerpoint to explain things in a way that makes you sound smart and takes all the credit away from engineers then what you did there is a skill exclusive to architects.

[perlgeek]

I would argue that naming very high-level things (like your top-level services) is very much an architectural decision.

[Geminidog]

Agreed. Only Software Architects have the special ability of naming things. Engineers and managers don't have this special knowledge.

When I went to Standford to get my PhD is Software Architecture I was required to take at least 2 semesters of classes on the theory of naming things in software. The biggest point the class made was proving mathematically how one should never name anything after a plant, Greek/Roman god, gemstone, animal or molecular structure.

[spookthesunset]

I hate with a passion services that have cute clever names. It makes it impossible guess what they do. It makes it easy to overload the service with things that don’t belong.... if the service was named “OrderService”, if somebody wanted to add a “spell check” endpoint people would start asking questions if that service was the right place. But since the service was named “CaptainCrunch”, who knows if spell check belongs...

Same goes for team names too... clever team names are obfuscation.

[Geminidog]

Agreed, the post you replied to had a sort of different point though. I took two semesters of naming things as part of my PhD in software architecture. Do you know anyone with such a PhD? Do you know of any course in any university that teaches people how to name stuff? Did you need to take such courses to arrive at your philosophy on naming things?

[GoblinSlayer]

Mathematics does calculations, not decisions.

[Geminidog]

The post was sarcasm that flew over your head. You can’t even get a PhD in software architecture because the entire field is a sham title created by industry. There is no theory or science behind “software architecture”

Either way you are wrong about math. All decisions can be mathematically modeled. It’s called a conditional expression, and you use it to model/calculate decisions when you program.

[BillinghamJ]

To be fair, most of AWS's services are also mere users of other AWS services

[Geminidog]

Naw. The term "mere" was to de-emphasize the importance of the term "architect" which doesn't apply to other AWS services.

The parent poster declared that AWS needed some "architects" which I think is kind of arrogant given the fact that most "architects" don't even have the ability to engineer the tools built by AWS. They are just "mere" users of the tools.

[zippergz]

After many years at big tech companies, I am now working at my first that has "Architect" as a separate role. While many of my colleagues in that role are great people and very smart, after a few years of living with it, I strongly believe that it's an "org smell" and I will seek out companies without it in the future. It creates completely the wrong dynamic to have the hands-on engineers, no matter their seniority, not be fully empowered and expected to make these decisions. And no matter how experienced and smart the architects are, if they aren't working hands-on with the systems and code on a regular basis, they can't make the best decisions. Software architecture as a separate job from software engineer is bad for everyone involved.

[btilly]

It gets worse. The transition from "programmer" to "architect" results after a few years with the architect losing track of where the rubber meets the road. This results in worse architecture decisions that are made by a similarly experienced programmer.

This effect is so strong that if you're interviewing someone who became an architect, make them write code in the interview. If they don't do it really well, you don't want them in ANY role. Because now they can't program, they can't architect. All that they can do is sound smart while they make bad decisions.

[xorcist]

> The transition from "programmer" to "architect"

Transition? If only it was at least that.

I've worked with architects whose job was the result of taking courses in software architectry at college and then they took a job as one. Apparently there are organizations looking for these people.

[ClumsyPilot]

"make them write code in the interview... Because now they can't program"

This comes across disrespectful and presumptious.

Firstly, do you believe that if you have not coded for 4-5 years you become useless just becauss you don't know the latest %fad% framework?

Secondly, the whole phrasing just conveys disrespect for cadidate, where the only responce to 'jump' is 'how high'.

If someone is interviewing for non-code postition they might tell you to take a hike.

The idea that a contrived 30 minute coding session tells you more about a candidate that studying code they've previously written or debugging together doesn't make awnce and is not supported by evidence

We don't ask surgeons: "since you can do heart surgery in 8 hours, surely you can reattach a toenail in 10 minutes during an interview"

[sokoloff]

I interviewed a very senior architect astronaut who literally couldn’t write code to compute the average of a list of numbers.

Wasn’t that they got hung up on the details of whether the average of ints should be an int, float, or double, or how to handle overflow, but just couldn’t get started at all.

After that, I stopped shying away from wanting to see code from even senior technical candidates.

(It was not a standard question for senior roles; I got a strong whiff of “this guy might be entirely full of it; let’s have a look-see”.)

[tguvot]

i am very senior architect astronaut. it will take me some effort to computer the average of a list of numbers in c/c++ as i didn't touch those languages in many years.

from the other side, while reviewing designs (not code) of various components I can spot locations where code handles sockets incorrectly or a couple of dozen of scenarios that system will fall apart under because engineers don't think that far.

value that I bring is not in averaging list of numbers. my value is 25 years of making mistakes, learning from them and knowing how to avoid them.

[Too]

Algorithm interviews should always let the candidate choose language to avoid these bad excuses, or in worse case even fall back to pseudo-code. If you can't calculate the average of a list of numbers in pseudo, then you are out regardless of how many years of mistakes you are bringing to the table.

[zingar]

The engineers you work with have to write code that does the equivalent of averaging a list of numbers, many times per day. If you can't (in any language) handle this then I question your ability to understand whether your choices make it easy or hard for the engineers to do their jobs.

[blub]

This "average of a list" is a red herring, because in practice one gets some variation of dynamic programming, trees, graphs, etc.

And for these kinds of more complex algorithms problems I would not expect most architects to be able to solve them, since they're utterly irrelevant for their jobs. Heck, a huge amount of software developers can't solve them and bitterly (and at least partly legitimately) complain about them to whoever will listen.

[btilly]

"make them write code in the interview... Because now they can't program" This comes across disrespectful and presumptious.

It is the interviewer's job to check the possible reasons to not hire someone and validate that the they aren't going to be problems. One of the possible reasons to not hire someone whose last job was "architect" is that they have lost contact with coding. If they have, then from experience I can tell you that they won't want to go back to coding, and their architectures are losing contact with reality. They are a liability.

This observation is not original to me. The first time that I saw it made explicit was when I took interviewing training while I was at Google. Google's experience is that a certain fraction of architects avoid coding. That fraction makes really bad hires. So they explicitly told people to look for that in the interview so that don't wind up accidentally hiring them.

But if someone's title is "architect" and they can code, then that isn't a concern. Companies do tend to promote good programmers to architect, and you don't want to miss out on those programmers.

Firstly, do you believe that if you have not coded for 4-5 years you become useless just becauss you don't know the latest %fad% framework?

This is a straw man argument. I said nothing about "latest fad framework". The exercise is to write some code, not write code in any particular framework or language. Go ahead and be offended at something that I didn't say, but please remember that I didn't say it.

Secondly, the whole phrasing just conveys disrespect for cadidate, where the only responce to 'jump' is 'how high'.

If an interviewee objects to writing code in the interview, how are they going to respond when they're asked to write code on the job? Seriously, if they get offended in the way that you just did, that's a good reason not to hire.

If someone is interviewing for non-code postition they might tell you to take a hike.

I do not want to work in an organization where "architect" is a non-coding position. Seen that, left in horror. So if I'm interviewing you, you are almost certainly being hired for a coding position.

The idea that a contrived 30 minute coding session tells you more about a candidate that studying code they've previously written or debugging together is idiotic.

It doesn't tell you more, but it tells you something different. In particular it tells the difference between someone who shows their own code versus shows someone else's code and lies about the source. (Yes, I have seen that.)

[ClumsyPilot]

"Companies do tend to promote good programmers to architect, and you don't want to miss out on those programmers."

Everything in your responce sounds to me like in your view, architect is 'extra senior' developer, whereas I understand it to be a different job. Isn't what you are describing a principal engineer?

"In particular it tells the difference between someone who shows their own code versus shows someone else's code and lies about the source. (Yes, I have seen that.)"

To eliminate that possibility, you can ask questions about the code, how it was designed, etc. Presumably if they stole the code, they are not going to know it inside-out, like the author would.

[btilly]

Tip, the word is "response", not "responce".

In my view, software architecture should be part of the job of a principal engineer, and the role "software architect" should not exist as a separate thing.

Separately, you would be amazed at how many developers will happily give you code that they wrote a year or more ago, and then not remember their design decisions. So not knowing it inside and out doesn't imply that they are not the author.

[humbleMouse]

I don’t buy this analysis. The principles of architecting code and system design are timeless. There are definitely people out there who don’t “code really well on command”, but can ask the right questions to design a solid system.

[btilly]

The principles of architecting code and system design are timeless.

That I emphatically agree with. Some of my favorite programming books are decades old.

There are definitely people out there who don’t “code really well on command”, but can ask the right questions to design a solid system.

There are?

I can't say that I've ever met one.

The problem is that people don't know what they don't know. A non-programmer can know exactly the business problem to solve and exactly how they want to solve it. But they can't tell the difference between what is easy for a programmer and what is hard.

They don't have to learn a ton of programming to fill that bit in. But if they never fill it in, that limitation will keep them from being able to be a good software architect.

[tguvot]

It will be me. I am systems architect and last production code that I wrote was probably 10 years ago or so.

I am probably rather crappy programmer. I was crappy perl programmer, crappy php (starting with version 2), crappy in delphi, c, c++. Probably okay in Python, but mostly because Python allowed to concentrate on solving problem and not fighting the language.

Me been crappy was probably because I never really enjoyed to write code, as interesting part is figuring out solution to a problem. Rest is implementation details :) You can say if you want that I am simply too lazy to write code.

Me been crappy in writing code doesn't mean that i am bad in understanding code or understanding what is it to write code the easy way or the hard way.

In majority of cases when programmers come to me with design that will be easy for them to implement, turns out that they have a bunch of big problems that they missed, mostly due to lack of experience. Most of the time solutions that they come up with complicate things further and add even more problems.

And this is the point of time when I assist them to simplify whatever complex design they made to something much more simple and doable.

I saved many man/years of development time by showing programmers easy ways that they didn't know that they exists

[btilly]

Your self-assessment matches the self-assessment of other systems architects that I've seen. Suffice to say that my assessment was so different that I never again want to work at a company who have people who think that is their job. And I've seen a wide variety of programmers from a wide variety of companies agree. As a random example look up the thread for someone who had decades of bad experience with architects at Microsoft who is massively happier at Amazon (which actively avoids the architect title and mindset).

Of course I've never met you, and you may be better than the bad examples that I'm aware of directly and indirectly. But a priori I have no reason to expect your self-assessment to be more reliable than past experience.

[blub]

Now I can't get the picture of Amazon employees in dark robes repeatedly reciting the tenets out of my head...

That being said, where's the proof that having PEs is better than having architects? If we look at results, I don't see any evidence that Amazon's creating better software than Microsoft on any quality axis.

[njonsson]

In 2020, the Amazon Principal Engineer community added a ninth tenet. Much effort went into crafting the new tenet, as was the case with the others. The new tenet may be my favorite of them all.

LEAD WITH EMPATHY

Principal Engineers shape an inclusive engineering culture where others are heard, feel respected, and are empowered. We are conscious of how our words and demeanor impact others, especially those with less influence; we take responsibility for that impact, intentional or otherwise. Our work builds productive relationships across teams and disciplines, and across a wide range of life experiences.

[mnsc]

This sound like a symptom of having too many smart people with too many diverging architectural ideas at the same place. How do the mgmt get them to march in the same direction? Easy, find the top 1% and create a mythological narrative around them. Then when a smart engineer in a team have a solid architectural idea he/she can defer to the Unicorn Principal that will "advocate" another "approach" that "balances tradeoffs" with "competing interests".

Sort of like the much hated ivory tower software architect.

[ClumsyPilot]

Just one question - 'elastic beanstalk' - who the fuck came up with that name?

[neilv]

That Amazon characterization of a Principal Engineer is great, and approximately how I've viewed the ideal role of the title.

Sometimes the title means being very highly skilled and experienced IC, or having deep historical knowledge of a particular system or organization, or being a niche technical expert. I like what Amazon's description adds to it expressly (which many have sometimes done unofficially), such as leading by example, engaging, and seeing humility as a quality of the role.

[Geminidog]

I share your disdain for "Software Architects." I'm curious on your reasoning though. Can you expand on why you hold disdain for "Software Architects"?

[LgWoodenBadger]

For me, regarding the ones who don't actively code, it's something along the lines of "everything compiles on a whiteboard."

[cek]

It really comes down to the tenets I posted above from Amazon. At MS there was a propensity for folks in these roles to just pontificate. We called them "Architecture Astronauts". As an example, they were rarely practitioners (they rarely wrote code).