This submission should include 2019 in the title. It was also discussed previously on this site here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001676.
Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
#12Reading through and wondering for perspective, this caught me: >No IT architects or enterprise architects. True, neither Uber nor Skype/Microsoft have hands-off software architect positions. Engineers at higher levels, like staff engineers, are expected to still regularly code. That statement says that EA is not commonly coding. Is that true? I don't know that I've met many architects that aren't engineers by another…
It's 100% true. My wife shared a house for a short period of time with an architect who was fairly new out of uni and did not know how to code, or have any real tech skills. At the same time I was working for large companies in digital transformation trying to teach them to let developers make decisions. It's common EA is about PowerPoint and talking to vendors with checklists, and doesn't require strong or sometimes…
> an architect who was fairly new out of uni and did not know how to code, or have any real tech skills.
This sounds more like a sales-adjacent role that pitches a company’s tech product lineup to the likes of product managers and other non-technical people at potential clients companies. For these roles, having someone who isn’t too deep into the details of the technology can actually help connect with other non-technical customers. You quickly remove this person from leading meetings and insert someone with tech skills if the other side shows up with actual engineers, though.
No actual engineering team is going to have an “architect” fresh out of college who doesn’t code or otherwise understand the tech. Having someone architect a system without understanding it doesn’t make any sense.
Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
#13The money quote is here: Actually, our approach is not that different in principle, to most architecture guides. This whole article is basically clickbait. The author appears to be arguing against some ill-defined strawman, but in the end even concedes that that isn't true. They are doing architecture, they just aren't doing it according to "the software architecture literature". Whoop de freaking doo. That statement…
Completely agree. You don't even have to go much further than reading the title with some more intent; How is having a "Clear and Simple Design" not a way of architecting a project?
Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
#14This submission should include 2019 in the title. It was also discussed previously on this site here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21001676 .
> Last updated 30 APRIL 2021.
Perhaps that's why ?
Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
#15Folks commenting that this is obvious are overlooking the way that architecture and patterns are often explained to junior-level engineers -- especially new engineers who aren't working for a company with strong engineering cultures. When I started out, I thought the way to become a senior engineer was to increase the number of patterns I knew off the top of my head. It was by speaking with more senior folks that I l…
When I was in software engineering school, we had a tongue in cheek word for this: patternitis.
Many undergrads who took the software architecture class ended up catching this strange disease that compelled them to write abstract singleton factory builders and other silly things. The cure is basically to write enough software to figure out where these patterns make things more understandable and where they detect from what's being written.
Maybe the GOF book needs a content warning for that. :-)
Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
#16Folks commenting that this is obvious are overlooking the way that architecture and patterns are often explained to junior-level engineers -- especially new engineers who aren't working for a company with strong engineering cultures. When I started out, I thought the way to become a senior engineer was to increase the number of patterns I knew off the top of my head. It was by speaking with more senior folks that I l…
When I was in software engineering school, we had a tongue in cheek word for this: patternitis. Many undergrads who took the software architecture class ended up catching this strange disease that compelled them to write abstract singleton factory builders and other silly things. The cure is basically to write enough software to figure out where these patterns make things more understandable and where they detect fro…
> tongue in cheek word for this: patternitis.
This term recently occurred to me:
OCD -- Obsessive Class Disorder
Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 100% true. My wife shared a house for a short period of time with an architect who was fairly new out of uni and did not know how to code, or have any real tech skills. At the same time I was working for large companies in digital transformation trying to teach them to let developers make decisions. It's common EA is about PowerPoint and talking to vendors with checklists, and doesn't require strong or sometimes…
Enterprise Architecture is a very different discipline from software development (and even solution architecture), and are usually found in non-tech organizations (i.e. banks, insurance companies, etc). EA is focussed on evaluating the business processes and technical solutions that make up the operations of a large scale organization. They try to identify and remove redundancy (e.g. multiple billing systems) and ens…
Is this closer to System Analyst, or -- as it sounds -- even higher level, like strategic infrastructure acquisition?
Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
#18Folks commenting that this is obvious are overlooking the way that architecture and patterns are often explained to junior-level engineers -- especially new engineers who aren't working for a company with strong engineering cultures. When I started out, I thought the way to become a senior engineer was to increase the number of patterns I knew off the top of my head. It was by speaking with more senior folks that I l…
from the article:
> it took me a lot of time to understand what this pattern does and had my "aha!" moment
The patterns are shorthand to discuss a set of concepts that can be useful in considering solutions to certain problems. Once the designer encounters those problems, and understands how the patterns can be used, the value is apparent.
It doesn't seem too different than many areas of mathematics, where the jargon burden is real.
Can the concepts be explained to a lay user? Yes.
Can the lay user then apply those concepts to solve problems? Likely not except in the most superficial of cases - the lay explanation ignores much detail that is required to get an effective solution in non-trivial cases.
Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
#19Neither software architecture nor design matters. The only thing that matters is whether you deployed your code to production. Code in production that solves customers’ problems right here and right now beats any architecture and design.
Re: Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
#20There is one simple thing that tends to dominate - every interface is an opportunity to fail.