Architecture Fighter Pilots
A long time ago Joel wrote a post about “Architecture Astronauts“:
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.
The other day, I came across a post entitled “In Praise of Architecture Astronauts“, suggesting that the alternative is Architecture Pedestrians. Where Architecture Astronauts live up in space in the ISS (Ivory Space Station) working on heady abstractions and generalizing to the nth degree, Architecture Pedestrians have their feet stuck tightly to the ground, never daring to generalize past the first level, keeping themselves firmly rooted in practical matters. You can’t write good software without abstractions, so Astronauts must be better than Pedestrians, right?
Fortunately, that’s a false dichotomy: there’s a whole lot of atmosphere between “floating in space” and “stuck in the mud”, with plenty of room for all varieties of Architecture Pilots.
The coolest of the architects is the Architecture Fighter Pilot. These guys fly the fastest planes, they can fly high, they can skim the ground, they can do crazy barrell rolls, and they get to shoot down MiGs in 1980s action films. When all is said and done, though, they land their planes and hang out with people on the ground. That’s the advantage that all pilots have over the astronauts in the ISS: it’s a lot easier for them to return to Earth and Get Things Done.
To abandon the metaphor before I get too carried away, the point is this: Astronauts and Pedestrians are at the two extremes of the architecture spectrum, and neither one should be encouraged. Moderation is key, and I’m sure that - rather than suggesting that abstractions are Bad Things - this is what Joel was getting at. Architects - and software developers in general - need the ability to create abstractions and to generalize, but they also need to the be able to apply those generalizations to make something that works.
A big part of being an Architecture Fighter Pilot is knowing how high you can go before you drift off into space.
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Your point is well-taken — any intellectual dichotomy will eventually prove to be artificial —. That said, with six years of hindsight we can see now that it’s precisely the observation that Joel mockingly attributed to the architecture astronauts in 2001 (Napster is a P2P network) that would have been most useful for the music industry and Napster’s own investors to understand.
Besides, sticking with the analogy, don’t you find satellite photos useful sometimes?
So how does you recognize an Architecture Fighter Pilot? Or become one? Or keep them from turning into Astronauts? Do you have anything practical to say, or are you a metaphor astronaut?
You’ve expanded the metaphor, but not said anything useful.
I don’t think you over-extended the metaphore by any means. That’s just a damn good metaphore.
The real dichotomy is that Joel’s words on being down to earth spawn the best conversations about abstraction.
David: I’ll certainly agree that P2P has grown tremendously since Joel’s original post, but I think what Joel said still stands. P2P use is widespread today because it lets people find and download media files, not because it’s P2P. The iTunes Music Store is a huge success for the same reason without having anything to do with P2P.
Even uses of P2P applications that have nothing to do with sharing music and movies are popular for reasons that have little to do with their “P2P-ness”. BitTorrent, even though it uses P2P networks to do its thing, was created with the Earthly goal of reducing load on centralized file servers, not of jumping on the P2P bandwagon.
And yes, I certainly do find satellite images useful
It’s unfortunate that the metaphor suggests that *real* astronauts don’t do anything useful.
Peter: avoiding “Astronautism” is simply a matter of remembering that in software development an idea is only as good as its implementation. If you’re spending all of your time “Talking” rather than “Doing”, you’re an astronaut.
Most of us are already pilots of some kind. Fighter Pilots are just those of us who are best able to deal in abstractions and generalizations while still keeping the practicalities of creating something that works in mind.
Just for fun, I’m going to beat up on your fighter-pilot analogy a bit (this has nothing to do with the real point we’re discussing).
Of all the people involved in (atmospheric) aviation, fighter pilots are probably the most highly trained but also the most useless: they fly fussy, expensive aircraft with the fuel burn of an airliner and the range of a Cessna (but with even fewer seats). They require huge ground crews to keep their planes in the air, and half of the planes are usually grounded with snags anyway. When fighters do manage to get into the air, they crash a lot of their own accord. A pure fighter (as opposed to a hybrid ground attack aircraft) is designed to shoot down the enemy’s bombers and protect its own, but hardly anyone uses pure bombers any more, so there’s not much to shoot down or protect. Even if there were something to shoot at, the fighters’ limited range makes them a hassle (most of Israel’s air force, for example, couldn’t reach far into Iran even if they wanted to, unless they stopped in Iraq to refuel).
Maybe airline pilot, bush pilot, or even crop duster pilot would be a better choice.
I’d like to suggest one more architecture type - the architecture super tanker. These are close to bottom of the athmosphere where all the work is done and move around the globe doing all the work, carrying out all the business critical tasks. They are old, big ,slow and take a heck of a long time to change course but carry out most of the business on the planet.
They maybe ugly and uncool but remember that the big giant pieces of software that dont have the luxury of turning on a sixpence are the ones that pay most of our salaries.
This is my philosophy on life. It’s all about balance.