What is frustrating about architecture to me is that it’s so rare to actually find a team with the discipline to care about it in code review. It’s easy to talk about it abstractly and whatever but when someone spent two weeks and throws a PR up on Thursday night expecting it to be merged the next day and they used the wrong design pattern, didn’t structure their domain model correctly or at all, and/or lacks clear interfaces, separation of concerns, etc. there’s no time for architecture and 99/100 times the PR gets merged. You know the story.

And it’s not totally bad, albeit still frustrating. All the good architecture in the world doesn't matter if you can’t build a product that people want to use. Similar to design.

I’ve been at a place once where people held others accountable to architectural concerns in PR. The reviews took longer and honestly it was exhausting at times but also probably one of the periods I developed most as an engineer if I look back at my career.

All this leads me to the conclusion that there’s a time and place to entertain the finer details of code structure and system architecture. And it’s not when you don’t have a product. It’s only once you have a proven business that needs to be concerned with the scalability, understandability, ease of teaching others, modularization and ability to reuse, etc. that these things even start to become smelly.

!Final note that a greenfield product must still be designed and engineered and build, but that’s not architecture. Architecture adds aesthetic qualities (that are ideally practical and functional as well) to a system.