The Sun Certified Java Developer Exam with J2SE 5: paper version from Amazon, PDF from Apress, Online reference: Books 24x7 Personal blog
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.
Tony Cagle wrote:Tim,
There have been many times in my career when I don't have a good answer to the question "what do you do". There have been many times over the years when a management decision has been explicitly made that "architects don't write code", meaning that they need us for "more important things". This is fine for a while, but eventually you have to work in the details to keep your skills sharp or you start to lose touch. I have found that keeping side projects going at home is the best way to keep my development skills sharp.
In terms of being "ashamed" to be an architect - well, this sounds like me on a bad day lol! The worst days are when the political aspects of the job outweigh any technical satisfaction I get from designing solutions.
In general terms, I love architecture as it affords me the opportunity to look at the big picture of a problem and think through different approaches. In the economic downturn of the last several years, architecture has been especially hard I think due to the fact that most of our work was focused on process improvement and scaling back our environment as opposed to building new stuff. It looks like things may be turning around though in the next year or two (all financial disclaimers apply to that statement!).
.......
Back to my first question: so would you guys say that an java architect is closer to a lead development role than other architect positions?
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.
Tony Cagle wrote:So what title would you prefer now if "Architect" as been debased? While I understand the frustration of bloated titles, we can all agree that the architect title did mean something "back in the day". Perhaps architects deal with large systems and not just large applications, as you say. How do we differentiate ourselves from those ambitiously-titled programmers?
Here is the trickier question: is there even a need for architects in most organizations anymore?
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.