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Joel Spolosky has a new post on a classic cause of failure for software companies:

"The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try."

Have any of you ever personally this? I certainly have. I suspect it's a function of easy money - whether its from VCs, act 221 or corporate slush money.

From a development standpoint, it's actually not much of a problem - mainly because you still get build new stuff and the pressure is not that high to deliver. But from the product/sales/marketing side, if you actually care about building a successful business, it's incredibly painful struggling with the gap between the company's dreams and it's ability to win in the marketplace.

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I've never heard this term, but I really like it! This is a very common problem because solving the more abstract template problem is usually far more interesting. On a microscale, I often see new architects trying to create god classes. "This data structure can be used as a list, a set, and a map." This is obviously not a useful abstraction. On a larger scale I see people trying to develop extremely generic solutions that no one will understand or use rather than building turnkey solutions that customers can grok and use without a lot of customization.

> Have any of you ever personally this? I certainly have.

Anyone who claims they haven't done this at some point in their career is either way smarter than us or is lying :-)

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