Where I work, we currently have a lot of high-level architects that are trying to implement enterprise-wide solutions to common problems, trying to make us a more flexible organization. No one, not me certainly, disagrees with that path. The problem we are encountering though is that their theory is simply not taking reality into account.
Our core business is not IT, it's servicing financial institutions. The enterprise architects forget that sometimes. For instance, I wrote an application last year that has worked flawlessly since. It makes the LOB it was designed for much more efficient, the users love it. By all measures that matter (in my mind anyway) it was a striking success, something that can't be said for all projects initiated lately. Now though, I am being told that I have to replace my print output subsystem with a system that was designed by them. Problem is, I have some serious concerns about whether it will do the job at all, and even if it does I already all but know it's going to have a negative impact on performance and user happiness. It's nice to want to share components like that, but if at the end of the day it makes things worse for the business, what's the point of having a better architecture?
When you have the time, by all means you should be architecting applications "properly". You should in fact fight to do so even when you don't have the time because of situations like Antonios.
That being said, the real world for us corporate developers doesn't usually work that way, so you have to make the best decisions you can IN THE ALLOTTED TIME AND BUDGET. If that means taking shortcuts sometimes, so be it. At the end of the day, my job isn't to design architecturally perfect solutions, it's to implement solutions that support the business. I make a huge effort to achieve BOTH those goals, as we all should, but that's not my primary focus. That's the reality.
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Lets face it, those of us who actually try to do things right will just get labelled as 'perfectionists' and not 'people who get things done', and the time we have to spend wading through the code the got-doners left so we can add feature Y makes us look like a hopeless bottleneck when compared to how quickly they got the original feature X working...
You are perfectly right. But this time I have to cry for my own work, so I have no one who takes the blame for me. On the other hand, I am trying to write better code because I am willing to leave my current job at the university (simply because universities in Italy don't pay very well...) and the one that will take my place is a friend of mine, and I don't want to break a friendship because I wrote horrible code :-) Well, if I will find a firm that will let me work, I will be one more "perfectionist" around :-P Ciao Antonio Petrelli
P.S.: Today electricity will be cut off at 12, so I am using the last portion of my time writing stupid letters instead of coding :-P
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