Community Comment: Part 15

The comments I provided in reaction to a community discussion thread:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6884136604764565505?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6884136604764565505%2C6884184734960775169%29

Director at Executive Search Firm:

Do not hire an architect if you want them to be sat writing code all day long!

Sounds simple, right?

Well, as crazy as it sounds, almost every week I speak to architects who have been hired by companies who then fail to give them the chance to actually focus on architecture.

Although I appreciate the talent market is incredibly challenging for a lot of companies, do not put round-pegs into square holes.

Even if there are technical architects, or "coding architects" who enjoy contributing to the code base (and vice versa for developers with architecture), architects and developers are not the same.

Stop wasting everyone's time and hire what you need!

Gfesser: I've learned that the term "architect" can mean many different things depending on the audience. This situation has gotten to the point that a fair number of firms even refuse to use this term due to some of the audience assumptions that are often made when hearing references to it. And adding qualifiers to "architect" often doesn't help much. While every company is arguably now a software company, many of the terms being used in industry simply aren't standardized. As such, job descriptions should be explicit as to what is expected of these roles, and the individuals writing these job descriptions should be close to the work being performed to help ensure accuracy.