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Discussion on: Opinion: Architect VS Engineer VS Developer

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Eric Rini • Edited

Job titles come from HR and the real world has little influence on them.

Separating developers and architects is like going back to the bad old days where the IT guy couldn't code and the developer didn't do any testing and that was OK because it wasn't their job.

The people who want to create narrow job roles like "architect" or "tester" or "programmer" and organize teams around these functional silos rather than the customer value streams they serve/create are typically HR "resource managers". They do this because they want to see people as interchangeable parts in a corporate machine rather than the complex and irreplaceable individuals that they actually are.

The job of a modern developer is to analyze, design, implement, test and deploy as a continuous and fluid cycle. They are regulated directly by customer feedback. In my experience, pure design teams who operate without consideration for a product/customer driven feedback loop (ivory tower architecture), tend to fail in a really slow but sure type of way that is very expensive.

The modern definition for an iterative developer was the answer to this old problem.