Banger of an article and this paragraph especially made me feel like the author personally knew me
Mark’s pyramid illustrates how fundamentally different the role of architect compares to developer. Developers spend their whole career honing expertise, and transitioning to the architect role means a shift in that perspective, which many architects find difficult. This in turn leads to two common dysfunctions: first, an architect tries to maintain expertise in a wide variety of areas, succeeding in none of them and working themselves ragged in the process. Second, it manifests as stale expertise—the mistaken sensation that your outdated information is still cutting edge. I see this often in large companies where the developers who founded the company have moved into leadership roles yet still make technology decisions using ancient criteria (I refer to this as the Frozen Caveman Antipattern).
To the first point, I was already thinking that maybe I too am an accidental architect but that note about burnout trying to stay on top of everything within your breadth of knowledge I completely understand. I’ve also done a lot of work over the past 4 years to offload and socialize a lot of knowledge because there was a point I couldn’t get my own work done in any meaningful way because I was getting interrupted multiple times a day with questions, and in meetings I kept hearing similar phrases to “I don’t get it but if anyone does, knows”. It’s not like I wanted to be the bus factor of one, but sometimes you don’t realize how high the silo walls got until they start filling it with grain.
To the second point, I’ve often had the idea with some enterprise architects I’ve encountered that they are idiots. I guess it’s not that they’re stupid, it’s that they are working too closely on outdated knowledge and tools so it looks like they’re dumb. It’s helpful that there’s been a big push in the enterprise architecture community to follow TOGAF recommendations for company technical maturity in the modern age with so many new frameworks and tech stacks popping up every 5 years.