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Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

> "Everyone owns architecture"

I don't agree with this. It appeals to our sense of egalitarianism, but in practice I haven't seen it work out well.

Ideally one or at most a few people, who are also developers, owns the architecture, so that it is consistent. They should be senior developers who still work on real features in the code base to avoid architecture astronautism.

Consistency in architecture is more important than genius in architecture in most cases. Let a thousand flowers bloom elsewhere in your life.

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I say it all the time. The maximum # of chefs who should be permitted in the architecture & design kitchen on day 1 is exactly one. You always want the person with the most experience and willingness to endure pain to undertake these efforts.

Building new, coherent architecture that your team will be willing to follow for years or decades is non-trivial and not something you can learn by going to college and/or consuming a bunch of bullshit tutorials from the internet. Architecture cannot be forked or cloned. It must be applied uniquely to the problem at hand.

To continue the analogy - You simply have to have tried to make that pasta dish so many fucking times that you become god of pasta dishes. You need to have customers (and employees) complain at you for 2 decades about various aspects of your cooking for you to truly understand what works and what doesnt.

> Consistency in architecture is more important than genius in architecture in most cases

Absolutely agree. This is why suggestions like "just use 1 big database for everything" are automatically a leap in the right direction for all involved. Only when this starts to get yucky should you turn on the clever bits of your brain.

The specific code arrangement is not that important, as long as the team understands some common domain model (types, properties & relations). The most successful architecture is one that the entire team can understand and communicate about without a senior developer babysitting them.

from one grug to another grug...

https://grugbrain.dev

Two people with 15 years experience will have experienced a different 15 years. Both are usually more valuable brought together.

If you make one of those people the "God of architecture" you're not only going to piss off the other one you will probably lose the benefit of their experience. If theyre not responsible for architecture they'll pay commensurately less attention to it. Thats a waste of a salary.

The only scenario I can think of where it to promote one above all others would really be worth it would be if you otherwise cant stop the team from bickering.

As for juniors - if anything I tend to feel like theyre too deferent even when encouraged to speak up and take ownership. The only exception is when they dont realize they are making an architectural decision.

If they’re professional, the second person will go “yeah, i can see why you’d do that, lets go with it”.

If a developer, especially a senior developer throws a hissy fit, they’re a Diva and toxic, not a Senior Developer.

the ability to sublimate your own ego in development is a tragically underrated skill

Exactly. Any Senior Developer who's actually earned that title and has the battle scars to prove it knows that there is no perfect architecture, there are simply sets of compromises. It's trade-offs and compromises all the way down. There's always somebody who looks at some little bit of the overall architecture & design and complains that it's not perfect and then use that to extrapolate that the entirety of the architecture sucks.

Don't even get me started on Conway's Law. I'm so tired of people proposing "fixes" to architecture that simply can't be supported by the existing organization. Your architecture is crap if your organization can't support it, period end.

Your architecture is also crap if it doesn't meet the expectations of the stakeholders. So architects have to manage those expectations as well. Then there's always the developer who wants to use the latest shiny and new technology so they can put it on their CV. Architects have to manage all that and then some.

Yet the agilists preach that architecture is going to simply "emerge." Ha! The only architecture I've ever seen emerge is of the same nature of what emerges from one's rear end!

At the end of the day you need one person responsible for the architecture and design of the system. You just need to make sure that person isn't a diva and seeks and listens to feedback and concerns from the development team. Good architects are worth their weight in gold.

You think two professionals will agree on all decisions all the time?

No. But professionals will communicate and compromise - not throw a hissy fit over disagreements.

I'd argue you should never do architecture alone, unless impossible, and it should be done with people of the same level. Of people are different levels, architecture is NOT by consensus, the most experienced will need to make the call, otherwise too much damage can be done

I think it’s important that everyone feels like they own the architecture. In practice, it means that everyone puts in ideas and the person or persons in charge only (gently) nix the ideas that don’t fit with their vision. But it’s important that everyone not feel stifled by a heavy-handed architectural vision that’s dictated from on high.

In tech, there’s often many right answers and a leader’s job is to ensure the team lands on one of them, not necessarily the leader’s favorite one. You’ll end up with far more inconsistencies if you have high employee turnover. Team cohesion is often more important than getting all the technical details perfect.

the noble lie vs. the sympathetically-delivered horrible truth

It’s more like a noble half truth, since the architect leaves themselves open to accepting a good idea that isn’t their own.

> it means that everyone puts in ideas and the person or persons in charge only (gently) nix the ideas that don’t fit with their vision

This. Architects have to have a really quite rare blend of skills: superbly diplomatic yet inclusive, and ideally in it for the long-haul.

> I think it’s important that everyone feels like they own the architecture.

You can keep your _feelings_ ... takes a few iterations to spot this toxic bullshit. Be explicit. Not everyone needs to get a participation star. The hired developers that were tricked into a false development process will eventually call out this bs and leave. Depending how gullible they are may take them longer.

I dont need to feel like I'm being heard. I need you to hear me if you're going to ask.

Note that the comment you're replying to talks about nixing feedback that doesn't fit with the vision (there's still a ton of ways the cat can be skinned), not about nixing all feedback, which seems to be what you're reading.

In movies, you have directors.

I think it's similar in development, the lead architect or vp or whatever, drives the vision of the overall architecture, architects shape those big things and drive the devs toward that direction

I read it more as "everyone (in the team) should be responsible for the architecture (of their products)". So, it's the duty of every engineer (even junior ones) to get to know more about the architecture of their products or to come up with decent architectures for future ones. Of course, some engineers know more than others (or have better taste). That's fine.

It's pretty common nowadays that only the "tech lead" or the most senior engineers discuss architectural topics that affect the whole team, but the most junior engineers are left behind.

I'm the tech lead of a sizable team, and what you describe, leaving junior engineers behind, would be a sign of failure on me.

Large software systems are complex, and there is too much detail for any one person to dive deep into everything, so in my opinion, you discuss overall architecture with the team, but critically, you explain _why_ you are proposing a certain approach, because more junior people don't have this context. Then, you ask the other folks to help you go deep into investigations on whether your architecture is compatible with the details.

If as a TL, you are not teaching and nurturing your young 'uns, you're doing a bad job.

What if your young 'uns just do not... participate?

I am in a position where I am doing TL-level decisions, and try quite hard to demo, discuss, share the details and rationale. I write design proposals, documentation, do demo sessions, etc

But the information is just not flowing, and I notice how little the juniors participate in anything. And I don't exactly know what to put my finger on. It's probably some soft-skill I'm lacking, and that I do not know how to improve

But a part of me still feels that that perhaps the young 'uns are just... too fresh. Or that the approach is just too optimistic

This is where people management comes into play. It's really difficult to identify why someone isn't participating, until you get to know their work and personality. I have regular meetings with all the engineers to discuss their work, progress, what is holding them back, expectations for career, growth, stuff like that. It's impossible to completely separate tech leadership from people leadership.

In my experience, usually, lack of participation comes from a lack of self confidence in one's understanding of software development, and usually, finding something small and delegating ownership to a junior engineer, with some oversight, gets them to participate more. You have to let go of the notion of having something done perfectly and allow them to make their own mistakes, but don't let them make huge ones. This is the most common case. There are also people who don't care (can't do much here), or aren't very good technically.

> lack of participation comes from a lack of self confidence

Yep that's it... let's not have management or leadership take any responsibility. It's the subordinates fault of course.

One place I worked, there was an architecture. The intent was that every programmer on the project could reproduce the same diagram of the architecture on a cocktail napkin. The reason is so that all programmers can keep the architecture in their head, to help guide their work. If they have to go look it up, they probably won't.

To make this work, the architecture needs to be somewhat simple. Architecture astronautics fail the "everyone can keep it in their head" test.

I think they stole that idea (everybody has the architecture in their head) from Extreme Programming.

This reminds me of an old quote that says: "A dog with two owners dies of hunger".

Curious. Cats with multiple owners/friends are notorious for finding ways to get fed repeatedly.

That's because cats don't have owners, they have staff.

I work in big tech, and that's pretty much how it works here. We don't have "architect" roles, instead every engineer owns a certain part of the system. The difference is scale and complexity: a mid level developer might design a feature or microservice, while staff developers own the architecture of entire systems. Senior/Staff engs oversee the overall system and delegate ownership of parts or subsystems to other devs. Your concerns about consistency are addressed with things like design reviews and regular updates.

This works well, so long as it's the official policy. If the official messaging is "we need to incorporate everyone's perspective", but the actual policy is "you can implement any pattern you want so long as it's our pattern", it becomes unbearable.

And the architect who imposes an architecture should also design the interface between components.

Imo, the bigger question is big or small architecture. Who owns it becomes derivative of that.

completely agree

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