| It's certainly true: architects' primary focus needs to be that architecture/platform work. Architecture isn't something you can just do on the side when you've got some free time, while still crushing out feature requests and bugfixes 40-50 hours/week. But. Architects can't be so detached from shipping code that they have no idea how things are actually made and shipped. Otherwise you get situations like aloof architecture astronauts casually dreaming up complex distributed or microservice architectures, which look great on the whiteboard, but entail an enormous shift in thinking, tooling, and processes. As well as lots of overhead in general compared to a monolithic architecture. Sometimes that is the right move, but it is a costly one and not a shift to make lightly. Had another "architect" 20 years ago dream up what was probably the world's dumbest architecture. He demanded that all application layer code be stripped out. We were going to build an entire interactive website with nothing but XML and XSLT. Where conditional logic was required, we could use conditional XSLT <xslt:if> statements. He tried to have us implement a social networking site with that. Had he tried to ship a single bit of code he would have realized it was insane. Also recently had architecture astronauts push an entirely new primary language on the team. The old one was deprecated. This change was largely championed by people who had never written a line of code in either language with no thought to the tooling changes, process changes, or the overhead of throwing away 10+ years of company-wide language expertise in Language X or the ramp-up time and bruises that would be required to get good at Language Y. After all, what did they care? They're architects. One way to avoid/mitigate this is to have architects build and ship proofs-of-concept and reference implementations using the proposed shiny new architecture bits before the rest of the team is expected use and master them. Learn as many of the speed bumps and potholes as possible. They should continue to do this and work closely with scrum teams as those teams build and ship. (That may sound obvious, but lol @ this industry) |