Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me one of the unsung skill sets of the industry is tool selection. The ability to look at a tool and imagine how it’s going to behave for different pay grades of coworkers, different specialties, and to predict how that will pan out in the future. Sometimes you pick the simpler tool, and hope it has legs. Sometimes you tweak your product roadmap to dovetail with the tool’s. Sometimes you push to get 25% of a featu…
Yes, and even though a lot of tech companies killed the architect role, this is exactly the job function assigned to architects, or more specifically enterprise architects in a lot of more traditional companies.
Especially in the post refactoring era, they tend to have an inaccurate account of what the code is actually like and make bad calls based on bad info. It’s a responsibility that works better when the people have their hands in the code. I’ve had better luck with Architecture as a job description shared by the lead developers. In large enough companies they have Staff Engineer that scratches that itch with perhaps slightly less people skills (though I really don’t recommend it).