I am working for a huge multinational software firm, and have been on job for slightly over 1 year.
The architect of my team has 15+ years of experience.
Th architect:
- Gets off from work at 3pm. (The majority of my team start late & finish late)
- Refuses to do necessary designs for the project, such as drawing diagrams or providing documentations. ("I couldn't spend all my day drawing pictures")
- Doesn't write code. Struggling to provide unit tests to a block of code he copied from an example project.
- Showed no interest in trying out new technologies, even if they are potentially valuable to the team. We have to write PoCs for him.
Our manager shows interest in listening to our thoughts during meetings. I couldn't help but call out on some of these lunacies. He would get noticeably aggressive and impatient. My manager would then engage in a discussion with me, and the architect would say stuff like is this worth discussing for so long.
EDIT: I tried to make the question more specific. I am expecting the architect to:
- Understand the basic interaction of classes/components of the current implementation.
- Read the code.
- Provide guidance and mentorship to the juniors. Challenge our implementations.
- Hold code review sessions,
- Design the architecture (class/component) from a grand view.
- Be curious about newly emerged frameworks/technologies, and provide a PoC to test them out if he thinks it's useful to our project.
- Do not say because this is a project of small scope so there's no design necessary. We implement it as easy as possible, even breaking established software principles.
Am I expecting too much from an architect?
EDIT AGAIN: I asked partially because our manager (the APO I mentioned) actually did point 3,4, to some extent 5, 6 (although not directly writing PoCs, we developers did that, as he brought these new techs up to us). I don't know if they are indeed the responsibilities of a manager, or should rather be the responsibilities of architects, if they have to be done anyways?
Regarding point 1 and 2, please do correct me if I'm wrong, but an architect should understand the architecture of the project inside-out? I am not exactly sure if he/she can if the architecture was not envisioned by him/herself, and also without thoroughly reading our code.