Uffff

Spot on.

And how do you know you’re not a thought leader? You call yourself one

Yeah, I was just talking to the CEO of a startup that I built the tech for, and still have a small equity stake in.

They formed a partnership with some dev shop that's going to rebuild everything that I made (that's working great and scales well).

I asked her why, and she said "because they say that doing microsevices on Azure is better architecture".

There goes that bit of equity, I guess.

/shrug

That's terrible, so sorry

Is it the fault of the thought leader, or the loads of juniors asked to implement the architecture but don't really understand it? If everyone had better system design knowledge, it wouldn't be so bad. 90% of the engineers in my organization don't understand the function of an API Gateway, for example. So the thought leader does propose a reasonable solution, but then it doesn't work because the organization doesn't have the hard skills necessary to deliver. I'm sure there's other reasons microservice-based architecture fails, but in my experience, this is a primary reason.

I feel this comment might go over people's heads if they take the connotation of a "though leader" as someone who makes a mess of things with overcomplicated solutions and then leverages it to greater roles before the consequences of the mess are discovered.

However, I've definitely seen this problem even with legitimately strong, seasoned technical leadership, where the vision is great, but the team just doesn't have the skills to pull it off. You can't have good macro-engineering without good micro-engineering. The problem with the cambrian explosion of tech is that it obfuscates the basics that engineers need to understand. Junior engineers end up struggling just to stay on top of incidental complexity and many come to the conlusion that building good software is just about learning enough languages and tooling, when in reality they are barely keeping their head above water and never learn the deeper lessons of what works and doesn't in software systems.

> juniors asked to implement the architecture but don't really understand it?

Can you reasonably expect a junior engineer to push back here and generally get traction? If this architectural decision has been made, it’s been made. At higher levels.

>If everyone had better system design knowledge

I don’t think this is a junior devs fault - they’re junior, after all.

> but then it doesn’t work because the organization…

Bingo.