Nikita KoselevLike many good stories, this one starts with the “Why?” question.
Why shall a developer learn architecture & business instead of improving knowledge in his own area of expertise?
Well, based on my experience, most bugs and most budget burns happen when people do not see the “big picture”.
Honestly, most of the software I have seen so far is not that complicated. Most tasks are more or less “typical” and can be solved more or less easily, if you know what you are doing and there is some support from the team, if need arises.
Unfortunately not every day is perfect, which is partially the fault of the ticket-tracking systems. Most tickets only describe the specific “story”, but they rarely represent the “full story”. Quite often it is “fix this, fix that, move system X from OS A to OS B”.
I have many times seen devs starting to code right after quickly reading the ticket, trying to close the ticket asap. Trust me, I have been a junior dev as well, although quite long ago :)
The problem is that even in the best case, such a "architecture-agnostic" dev will create what he was asked to create and not what the company needs. After X number of lengthy and costly feedback loops the software will be there, but time will be lost.
I believe that knowing the architecture of the infosystems involved and having a good understanding of the business can be more important than keeping up to date with the latest tech stack.
Most of the time the tech stack will not be changing daily, not even in dev environments.
However the dev tickets will need to be done daily and each of them will be delayed by preventable lack of business and architectural knowledge.
Also, it will be harder to proactively notice problems which might be caused by other parts of the system (not the piece of software you are working at).
I remember one guy bringing a huge value to the team because he called my boss and said “. Do you know there is a land reform planned to happen in Latvia?”. That reform included a change of postal addresses. Due to this proactive person we were able to start planning earlier, which helped us a lot.
Of course there are exceptions. It is possible to work without any understanding of the business and infosystem as a whole. However such an approach turns out to be costly, at least in my experience.
Stay tuned and I will share my thoughts on ways to become an architect these days :)
Many thanks to @brjavaman , @ymoto and Dave Snowdon for inspiring me to share my thoughts on the subject.
