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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4490 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Ok I'll bite, what's a "software architect"?

I mean as a job description.

I've been a software engineer for over 15 years. I have a grasp of what "architecture" means in terms of a large-scale enterprise application. But a handful (not all or even most) of my jobs have had a guy I would sort of report to called a "software architect" and best I can tell he answers some occasional questions about frameworks to use, etc.

But like is that what he does all day? There seem to be long swaths of time when nobody on the dev team interacts with the guy at all. What is he doing then?

I guess what I'm asking is, is this a good grift?

But like is that what he does all day?

He draws UML diagrams and discusses them with management.

More seriously it does vary a bit on the company.

In some cases it basically is just a sinecure -- he was a solid developer early on and now the CTO is his buddy and feels the company owes him. He probably knows a lot about legacy systems the company has so they want to keep him around just in case.

How were major decisions about architecture made? Was it just the dev team?

Usually major stuff he was at least in the room for, often (but not always) exuding authoritative energy

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