I was a couple of decades in, and had a pretty decent “career” as a software contract employee – amongst some of the other full-time employments I had, but thought maybe I should try and start hanging my hat on the “Software Architect” role as a title to boost the resume.
I know now and suspected at the time, that title inflation was not just a thing, but a big thing. Twelve years before the time of this particular job, I didn’t want to accept the title of Software Architect because I couldn’t think of myself as that person – not enough experience in my own opinion. In the interim I did, and even held that as a job title a few times.
So I looked for, found, and got hired into a position as a Software Architect for a learning management software company that had been acquired by one of the big tent software conglomerates (their management consulting branch) in which they were required they put a product team in their corporate development center which was conveniently local to where I was living at the time.
Short Stint in a Dense Situation
Legacy Background (Staccato Mode)
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Many customers on cloned and mutated copies of different “versions” of acquired LMS product; different DB schema, different code, different websites. The product was a label more than a technical consistency.
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Different technical and business principals owning or guiding specific customer or customers; with the ensuing intra-organizational friction
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Big weekly meetings (yep, them again) where notes are taken, not specific problem solving sessions, but problem and activity reporting. Sort of like staff meetings, but more punishing as they ran for 2 hours or more and let everyone signal they were working on important things and not therefore idle and re-assignable.
Organization
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Local “Team” setup: 1 architect, 1 dba, 2 senior developers
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Each of us reported to a different person back at the home office. We weren’t organized as a team, but as a group of co-located requirements.
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Monthly to quarterly meetings at the home office for no real reason, other than to make sure we were alive (I suppose)
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Conglomerate thought our local “team” controlled the “product” and started inviting us to integration meetings with the rest of their suite.
Plus Side (for me at least)
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Got to experiment with dependency injection, greenfield Entity Framework and DB design, web-service call path dependency selection
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Gained direct experience with the ideas that titles themselves are not nearly as important as the role’s responsibilities – I had let myself believe it would be more than it actually could be, a notion I now had some defense against happening again
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Learned about SCORM and found it a good conceptual basis for the model of a multi-tenant internationalizable learning management system.
Climbing Out (End Staccato)
I would have loved to have taken that redesigned software out to mass corporate market – integrating it with their enterprise service bus along the way. While there was a lot to do to get it productionalizable, I had a pretty clear vision of what that would take, and it didn’t seem I could muster the resources and real buy-in to do that, since I couldn’t even direct the team local to me.
Ultimately when my own frustration on control, direction and organizational vision was shown to be overwhelmed by the same frustration of some of the legacy people I trusted (who would have loved for me to take the product vision forward more), I realized I should get out before I broke myself.
Back to Back to Mercenary Mode
On to Performance Prescription
Pursuit of Value 