- The cockiness
- Losing touch with technology
- Keeping clean hands by delegating all the dirty work
- Taking credit for everything, even when you did nothing
- Finding opportunities for yourself, but not for others
When the responsibility escalates to little or no coding and being in charge of the long term direction of multiple projects simultaneously, when that person spends more time in meetings than anything else and gets this "architect" title, the bridges start to get burned and the hate begins to flow. Before long, that guy you used to enjoy going on lunchtime burrito runs with asserts himself in ways you never thought possible and seems to be leading your project team, as well as the others he's been given jurisdiction, over an irrational cliff.
Pete Johnson, 2008
In my personal oppionion he perfectly nailed the points down. The bigger the projects get, the more you are in trouble and the easier it is to forget about the mentioned things. The only thing you can do is to find your personal way through all the different needs of your team members, customers, technology or whatever else hits your road doing a successfull project.
You can visit Pete's personal blog and read more about his work. I was suprised to find out, that he build the first ever webapplication inside HP :)
Thanks for the kind words Markus, I'm glad you enjoyed the article. To be fair to other HP developers, I claim "one of" the first webapps. HP is a big enough company that I could never be sure it was the absolute first, but it's a definite contender.
ReplyDeleteIt was a web front end to a document submittal system used by enterprise phone support folks and their knowledge database. It went live the first week of January '96, worked with a specific version of Mozilla, and contained no table tags because the spec for that came out while I was developing it and browser support for it was spotty 8). As a result, it had <pre> tags all over the place to space out the elements correctly. Oh, how far we've come!
---Pete
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Pete Johnson
Hewlett-Packard Company
Marketing and Internet Platform Services IT
Portals and Applications Chief Architect
Work email: pete.johnson@hp.com
Personal email: pete.johnson@nerdguru.net
Personal Blog: http://nerdguru.net