| To the deficiencies that you list, I have to say that your organizational structure can create better developers, or make them worse. Delegating all responsibility for the bigger picture to architects and hiding developers from those issues will make them worse. On the reverse, I admit that not every developer can learn to do architecture well. But when you enable developers to take those responsibilities, the ones who are capable of it will step up. My rule of thumb for developers goes like this. I mentally divide developers into junior, mid-level and senior. This has nothing to do with their titles. The breakdown is that a junior developer is still learning basic programming consistency and good habits. They generally struggle on programs that go over a couple of thousand lines. A mid-level developer has internalized consistency but is unable to remain aware of the big picture while focusing on details. They tend to top out and struggle at 10k-20k line projects. A senior developer is aware of the big picture while dealing with details, and remembers details while dealing with the big picture. They tend to top out around 200k line projects. And a principal software engineer adds an awareness of subtleties about how the big picture is likely to evolve, and how to guide that in a long-term positive way. These people can manage architectures in the millions of lines. On this scale, I rate myself senior. To move to the next level, I'd need to spend more time at large companies with very large codebases. But dealing with the associated politics is not my preference so I'm happy where I am. The issue is that really good developers are rare. Developers that you can delegate to them and sleep well at night are a rare commodity on the market. I been working in dev for 25 years, both in startups and in established companies and I maybe know only dozen of people like this. Judging by what I saw of environments with software architects as a role, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this. However I know a heck of a lot more than a dozen programmers that I consider good like that. OK, throw out top-notch organizations like Google, and just go for relatively small companies that I've worked at. Let's narrow it farther and just do places that I've worked in the last 10 years. I still have no problem getting past a dozen. Why? Because I choose to work at organizations where software architecture is owned by developers. With other developers who have made the same choice. (Incidentally, 3 of those programmers were co-founders at ZipRecruiter. Who hired a lot of mutual acquaintances on my list, then grew to be a billion dollar company. Somehow I don't think that this is coincidence.) |
BTW, principal software engineer in many places == architect. Titles are very country dependent, company dependent. When startup where I worked was bought by US company I became principal. When I was acquired by German, I was retitled... don't even remember to what.
>Judging by what I saw of environments with software architects as a role, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this.
I wasn't always working in companies that had this title. Yet, this still remains true. Also we may have different standards and operate in different environment on different types of products :)