Hawaii's Tech Community
Architecture Astraunats
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.
"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.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Daniel Leuck on -
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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