Good Architects Have Five Big Flaws

“This is good enough.”

Forget Myers-Briggs. Here are five character defects good architects have:

1. They’re lazy
2. They have short attention spans
3. They have poor memories
4. They steal
5. They cheat

A Good Architect is Lazy

Because they’re lazy, they hate doing repetitive work. They’re happy to spend extra time creating re-usable patterns, guidelines, and presentations, which they use to explain what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. They love “re-use”, because that’s how they get out of the hard work of doing exactly the same thing over and over. Because they’re lazy, they tend to be good at delegation. Getting someone else to do their work for them. A good architect is so lazy, they’ll spend time teaching other people new skills, just so they can get out of doing some hard work themselves. Devious. They justify their laziness by calling it “working smart, not hard”. But we all know what’s going on, don’t we?

Bill Gates is rich, so we trust him, right? Here’s what he says:

Good Architects Have Short Attention Spans

Because they have short attention spans, good architects don’t like to dive too deeply into anything. They love skimming over the top. They’re generalists. They get bored easily. They’ll move on to the next thing, even if the last thing they worked on isn’t 100 percent finished. They’re not perfectionists. You’ll often hear a good architect say “That’s good enough. It’s fit for purpose. Nothing is ever perfect or complete anyway.” What kind of attitude is that?

Good Architects Have Poor Memory

Because they have poor memories, good architects develop clever ways to cover up this personal shortcoming. They will actually capture the knowledge they need to remember — in searchable, persistent form. Like an architecture repository. That’s almost like cheating, when you think of it.

Good Architects Steal Things

Good architects are not above stealing other people’s ideas. If it’s an idea or an artefact — and it works, and works well — they’ll steal it before you can say ‘intellectual property’. And they’re proud of their light-fingered chicanery. They brazenly brag about where they steal their ideas from. They think it sounds better if they call it ‘re-use’ (not ‘theft’). And they laugh about it. Ha ha. Clever obfuscation, that. Cheeky buggers.

Good Architects Cheat

And finally, a good architect is willing to cheat. They cut corners. They’re the ones who find perfectly justifiable reasons not to blindly follow rules and process. They hate filling out forms and standing in line. They’re always doing something new that no one else anticipated anyone would want to do. And they turn their clever new methods and techniques into guidelines, principles, and policies that other people then need to follow.

And In Conclusion…

So if you’re interviewing a candidate for an architect role, and they tell you how hard they work, how good their attention to detail is, that they have an excellent memory, and that all of the work they do is always original, and they insist on following rules … do you really want to hire someone like that?