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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4489 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

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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?

There are all kinds of architects around. At the places I've worked there have been:

  • enterprise architects, who are probably the biggest grifters. I guess they are supposed to tell the business what tech there exists that they can leverage, but I've never seen them do anything

  • technical architects, who were in charge of managing the system software and hardware stack

  • solution architects, who would draw boxes and arrows and manage the business software stack

  • data architects, who would look at these arrows and ensure the data would end up in the appropriate system

  • platform architects, who would manage either the evolution of a complex enterprise software or the use of some development platform

I'm probably missing some.

Good platform architect can help in a situation like "ok suppose we want to use AWS for our project, now which services out of slightly over 9000 we'll need to look into to solve this specific set of problems?" - there's probably a specific name for that but I don't remember now. Good data architect is hugely valuable because proper data architecture may mean the difference between running a job for a week or being done in 15 minutes. But those are also very hard to find, in my experience.

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