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YanniRotten posted:I would rely on an architect for high level system design across many individual teams and not care if they were a good safety net for whether my application-level code is good. Maybe architect has a different meaning where you are? I'm certainly not having one of my company's few architects review my API code changes, they might review a design document about a large multi-system feature I'm proposing but not a pull request to implement MYPAPI-123. I’d normally agree and architects at other places have been way more hands off. But he is the only senior or above assigned to approve every PR into our system. Admittedly, our team is a mess right now and ideally we’d have an actual on our team senior to do what I’m talking about .
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Apr 30, 2022 18:46
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In that environment I would do peer review of PRs so you remove a single point and the architect can concentrate on their strengths.
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Apr 30, 2022 20:19
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meanolmrcloud posted:really scrutinize my PR’s before I send em out i do this and i wish everyone else would
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May 1, 2022 00:04
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BigPaddy posted:In that environment I would do peer review of PRs so you remove a single point and the architect can concentrate on their strengths. It sounds like an environment where this might be the blind leading the blind and their architect has one rheumy eye, so having him do code reviews is important.
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May 1, 2022 00:53
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I’m my current role as an architect, I’m not expected to create or review code at all…
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May 1, 2022 16:52
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I don't even know what my position is now technically. I do a lot of client demos and not a lot of programming. I'm also the de facto scrum master until we can hire a real one, so I get to unfuck Jira. At least I get paid well for it I guess.
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May 1, 2022 17:01
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lol on the other side of the house they've crammed ~20 developers onto one virtual machine with 8gb memory at max.
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May 2, 2022 19:30
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Anyone have any good resources on how to improve my skills as an interviewer? For better or for worse I am getting dragged into more candidate interviews and might even have to do one on my own. My usual setup is to give a brief primer of the work our team is doing, the type of products we work on, a brief overview of some of our tools and then open it up to the candidate for questions. Afterwards I'll try to tailor a few questions to their resume/CV as well to get a sense of if they're talking poo poo about their qualifications or not. But that's maybe 10-15 minutes worth of time, and I certainly don't want to fill any extra time with rote fizzbuzz questions. But also at that point I feel like I've kind of sussed out the candidate to the best of my ability. Just feels short for an interview, can't help but feel like I'm missing something? Macichne Leainig fucked around with this message at 15:55 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 15:45
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Protocol7 posted:But that's maybe 10-15 minutes worth of time, and I certainly don't want to fill any extra time with rote fizzbuzz questions. But also at that point I feel like I've kind of sussed out the candidate to the best of my ability. Just feels short for an interview, can't help but feel like I'm missing something? Have you tried shifting to have a normal conversation with them for the rest of the interview once your agenda is done? If I can’t have a normal conversation with someone, I am not interested in working with them. That includes both sides - interviewers or interviewees. That’s just my opinion and I’m sure others disagree. $0.02
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May 6, 2022 16:04
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As a general question about architects, from a senior dev/tech lead perspective: if they’ve only ever been subtly misinformed or downright out of touch is that normal?
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May 6, 2022 16:25
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Moon LLC posted:As a general question about architects, from a senior dev/tech lead perspective: if they’ve only ever been subtly misinformed or downright out of touch is that normal? Pretty much.
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May 6, 2022 16:32
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mitztronic posted:Have you tried shifting to have a normal conversation with them for the rest of the interview once your agenda is done? This is a good idea. If they aren't a good "culture fit" or whatever the buzzword is these days then it's probably a moot point hiring that candidate.
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May 6, 2022 16:40
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Here is my Enterprise Architect tries to write code story. Guy had a lot of experience but had not written code in a long time. Employer was having issues with a ETL tool and so put their “best” guy on it. He was trying to write some JavaScript to translate dates between two systems. He spent a few days not understanding why he was getting errors about the number of the day of the week. He made the rookie mistake of thinking the days of the week were 1-7 but JavaScript does it 0-6 as they just use the index of an array. So babby not long out of Uni me pointed this out and then it worked without issues. Again smart guy, used to write code for a long time but was not up to date with the gotchas of current popular languages. If you have an architect who thinks they know everything then it can be an issue, if they are able to paint the broad strokes and allow the devs under them to so the details it is fine.
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May 6, 2022 16:41
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I generally give code writing type interviews, and try to make it conversational. I’m not really concerned with ensuring the candidate completes the problem, you can usually get a vibe that they know how to code fairly quickly, imo. I generally have only interviewed Jr candidates though. Fortunately, all the candidates I recommend have been strong hires, unfortunately they all get poached almost immediately by another team. The Dark Souls of Posters fucked around with this message at 16:44 on May 6, 2022 |
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May 6, 2022 16:42
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Protocol7 posted:Anyone have any good resources on how to improve my skills as an interviewer? I think the best candidates communicate well and will use opportunities to say what they want you to hear. The way you ask questions can facilitate that. I like these: Tell me about something you're proud of. Have you ever worked through a tricky situation? What was it like? Is there anything you wish I'd asked about that I didn't? I also think anyone doing business software should be able to talk relational databases at least a little (normalization, SQL injection) but apparently they aren't as widely used as I thought
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May 6, 2022 16:50
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cum jabbar posted:I think the best candidates communicate well and will use opportunities to say what they want you to hear. The way you ask questions can facilitate that. I like these: This is solid advice.
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May 6, 2022 16:56
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BigPaddy posted:Here is my Enterprise Architect tries to write code story. Sign posted:Pretty much. Was hoping for some good stories  I’ve also confirmed my attention to detail in documentation is higher than the architect’s. Good thing if it all works out I’m  soon
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May 6, 2022 17:08
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cum jabbar posted:I also think anyone doing business software should be able to talk relational databases at least a little (normalization, SQL injection) but apparently they aren't as widely used as I thought If you're interviewing someone that has a history with SQL I think it's fair to evaluate them on it. Whether it's relevant has more to do with what your team actually does.
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May 6, 2022 17:10
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cum jabbar posted:I think the best candidates communicate well and will use opportunities to say what they want you to hear. The way you ask questions can facilitate that. I like these: These are good questions because the point to specific examples from their work history rather than general idealised process answers. Some people are just really succinct so the interview just runs short but if you have to keep prompting the candidate to continue then it's horrible. I try to keep chat to bare minimum outside of work related questions. Maybe a 'did you get here ok?' something like that but never ask a personal question or one that could be construed as one. Even asking about a career gap is on the edge for me .
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May 6, 2022 17:29
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Aramoro posted:I try to keep chat to bare minimum outside of work related questions. Maybe a 'did you get here ok?' something like that but never ask a personal question or one that could be construed as one. Even asking about a career gap is on the edge for me . Weird, I do the opposite. Some small talk at the beginning to try to calm the nerves. Like, if I see a dog in the background of a zoom call, I’m asking about the dog. I consider it a softball question.
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May 6, 2022 17:48
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Sounds like a ruff start to an interview
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May 6, 2022 17:52
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My ability to effectively manipulate the ORM we use has significantly improved based on the level of effort I’ve spent learning SQL, fwiw. Not really relevant to interviewing but something I think is worth considering
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May 6, 2022 17:54
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lifg posted:Weird, I do the opposite. Some small talk at the beginning to try to calm the nerves. Like, if I see a dog in the background of a zoom call, I’m asking about the dog. I consider it a softball question. For me what you need to do is cut down the possibility of unconscious bias, you don't want to hire people who are just like you and personal questions can run the risk of touching on protected characteristics. All candidates need to be asked the same set of questions.
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May 6, 2022 18:23
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Aramoro posted:For me what you need to do is cut down the possibility of unconscious bias, you don't want to hire people who are just like you and personal questions can run the risk of touching on protected characteristics. +1 Although moderation of course.
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May 6, 2022 21:35
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Moon LLC posted:As a general question about architects, from a senior dev/tech lead perspective: if they’ve only ever been subtly misinformed or downright out of touch is that normal? architect as a dedicated role is terrible because you can't design coherent systems without occaisonally implementing systems yourself. there's way too much detail and undocumented behavior in components to be able to make great decisions without having hands on experience architect as a dedicated role is terrible because engineers don't want to implement designs they had no input into, so even if you are a great architect you're at the mercy of the implementers when it comes to delivery
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May 7, 2022 23:12
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My problem with architects is that even if they participate in the initial implementation they immediately move on to the next big new project, so they're never around long enough to see what the long term issues of a system is. Because of that, they keep repeating the same maintainability mistakes over and over.
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May 8, 2022 00:45
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i don't even know what an architect does. do they send over a visio drawing of some boxes and arrows over to a dev team? do they stub out a bunch of classes and methods? do they repost the word "kafka" into every slack channel and design document?
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May 8, 2022 02:19
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The only architect I've ever worked with just wrote a lot of documents that no one read.
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May 8, 2022 04:23
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I am so gratified to hear that none of you know what a software architect does, because I work with one, and I don’t know what he does except for specify complex and brittle data structures that constantly break in unexpected ways.
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May 8, 2022 04:40
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Software architects have extensive knowledge of building codes and enough knowledge of engineering to be aware that their elegant designs are entirely impractical, but someone else will be fixing the structural damage in 10 years anyway so why worry?
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May 8, 2022 04:54
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Software architects are in meetings all day, in which they provide information about systems that development teams want to integrate with. After a programmer demonstrates that they know the right way to build something complex, their bosses make the mistake of giving them the responsibility of ensuring that the rest of the organization knows how to build their own complex things in a consistent way that integrates well. It starts off promising, but before long the world changes out from under them, their skills grow stale, and they lose the context needed to make appropriate designs. Experienced programmers should know how to do software architecture. It is a valuable skill, but not one that should be specialized in. Businesses that understand how this can be possible avoid creating the software architect role.
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May 8, 2022 06:47
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The only software architects that I found to be successful were ones that were essentially just project managers. Putting people into a room, trying to find consensus and then from that distilling a very high-level breakdown of who should be doing what. As soon as they start involving themselves with, idk, fields in an API or a database table things go wrong. Things go even more wrong if they fancy themselves developers after a while, since "how difficult can it really be"? They might start building things themselves, invariably lacking tests or just generally "a prototype, the team can fill in the rest later".
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May 8, 2022 08:14
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I will be one in a couple of weeks so I will let you know. I am hoping it is just a fancy title justifying a certain type of pay grade for a certain type of senior engineer that gets pulled into meetings a bit more than usual.
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May 8, 2022 10:29
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Having been a software architect, its great. They're called architecture astronauts for a reason. Just make really great suggestions and hope others can implement it, just produce PoCs forever.
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May 8, 2022 10:52
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Aramoro posted:Having been a software architect, its great. They're called architecture astronauts for a reason. Just make really great suggestions and hope others can implement it, just produce PoCs forever. I absolutely hate it when an architect or a lead engineer or whatever drops a PoC over the fence and goes "you finish it". I mean it's fine when they involve us in the design process but if it just gets added to your backlog with no context it's awful.
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May 8, 2022 11:51
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$newjob added me to the Enterprise Architecture Forum a month or so ago, one of my friends who's a high-level Systems Architect recommended looking into TOGAF, and I guess I have a lot of reading to do  For the moment they're happy to have a representative from the operational side, but it would be nice to know what I'm doing 
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May 8, 2022 11:57
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Wibla posted:$newjob added me to the Enterprise Architecture Forum a month or so ago, one of my friends who's a high-level Systems Architect recommended looking into TOGAF, and I guess I have a lot of reading to do Brb getting officially licensed as a SCRUM(tm) Master
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May 8, 2022 12:00
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Sagacity posted:I'm sure an organisation trying to sell certifications is definitely the best source of information regarding software architecture. Did someone kick you into the cynic bath this morning? 
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May 8, 2022 12:10
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Wibla posted:Did someone kick you into the cynic bath this morning? 
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May 8, 2022 12:53
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I had a Senior Software Architect title once I think it basically meant "this guy has been here the longest and knows how all our stuff works" I personally don't like terms like architect or engineer. I'm a software developer, or computer programmer if you want to kick it old school.
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