(From Joel Spolsky’s Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You, with words and phrases swapped out for something more topical. The original piece was written in 2001.)
When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.
These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It’s very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won’t stop thinking about Architecture. They’re astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don’t know how they’re breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.
A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Bitcoin is a blockchain service for tracking and transferring a decentralized cryptocurrency” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s a blockchain service, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can mine your own Bitcoin and transfer it to other people.
All they’ll talk about is blockchain this, that, and the other thing. Suddenly you have blockchain conferences, blockchain venture capital funds, and even blockchain backlash with the imbecile business journalists dripping with glee as they copy each other’s stories: “Blockchain Technology: Dead!”
The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: “Can you imagine a platform like Bitcoin where you can decentralize anything, not just currency?” Then they’ll build applications like Ripple that they think are more general than Bitcoin, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets you mine currency — the feature we wanted in the first place. Talk about missing the point. If Bitcoin wasn’t based on a blockchain but it did let you generate your own units of currency and exchange it with others, it would have been just as popular.
…
That’s one sure tip-off to the fact that you’re being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!
Why the hell are people so impressed by boring architectures that often amount to nothing more than a new format on the wire for RPC, or a new virtual machine? These things might be good architectures, they will certainly benefit the developers that use them, but they are not, I repeat, not, a good substitute for the messiah riding his white ass into Jerusalem, or world peace. No, Microsoft, computers are not suddenly going to start reading our minds and doing what we want automatically just because everyone in the world has to have a Passport account. No, Sun, we’re not going to be able to analyze our corporate sales data “as simply as putting a DVD into your home theatre system.”
Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve. Soap + WSDL may be the Hot New Thing, but it doesn’t really let you do anything you couldn’t do before using other technologies — if you had a reason to. All that Distributed Services Nirvana the architecture astronauts are blathering about was promised to us in the past, if we used DCOM, or JavaBeans, or OSF DCE, or CORBA.
It’s nice that we can use decentralized mechanisms now for transferring payments. Whoopee. But that’s about as interesting to me as learning that my supermarket uses trucks to get things from the warehouse. Yawn. Mangos, that’s interesting. Tell me something new that I can do that I couldn’t do before, O Astronauts, or stay up there in space and don’t waste any more of my time.
(If you made it all the way to the end without reading the original article, try guessing what the original examples were for extra credit!)