The 25 Year Old Architect Problem
Architects with 25 years of experience are being drowned out by 25 years olds with no experience of architecture.
Imagine an associate solicitor, fresh out of their law conversion course, gets on stage at a TED conference and starts publicly critiquing landmark Supreme Court judgments and giving their hot takes on legal ethics.
Imagine they’re followed by a first-year med student with a talk on brain surgery, and their description of the “top 10 neurosurgery techniques” gets written up as an article and goes viral.
Would you expect there to be repercussions? Raised eyebrows? A few quiet tuts from the back rows?
In the weird world of software, we don’t even get that. Those with the least experience and the loudest voices get rewarded. We applaud the enthusiasm and celebrate their reach. We all too often promote it.
And I get it. I called it the weird world of software for a reason. On the face of it, software engineering isn’t like those other fields. There’s nothing physical about it. If you mess up a commit, you don’t leave anyone paralysed. You might break the build, but you’re not likely to break the law.
But there are consequences. Awkward software design causes frustration. Bad software architecture costs money. And some mistakes1 even cost2 lives3.
Our industry doesn’t have apprenticeships in the way trades do. We don’t have protected titles like “Doctor” or “Chartered Engineer” (at least, not in any meaningful way). What we have is GitHub. Stack Overflow. Hacker News. And, unfortunately, LinkedIn.
Which means perception all too often trumps practice.
This article was prompted by a post on LinkedIn4 from
, and although I’ve long been bothered by posts from people with minimal (or sometimes zero) real relevant experience, it made me realise what it is that’s actually bothering me.It’s not the ambition, it’s the confidence without consequence. The self-declared expert with neither curiosity nor experience. The kind that doesn’t say “I’ve tried this and here’s what I learned”, but instead says “Here’s how it should be done”.
This isn’t gatekeeping, it’s context keeping.
There’s a big difference between writing to share what you’re learning, and writing as if you’ve already arrived. This isn’t gatekeeping - everyone should be allowed to write their thoughts - but it is context keeping. If you write an opinion, or attempt to provide advice and guidance, and you don’t have the experience to back it up, it should be made clear what knowledge base you’re sharing from.
Writing something and hitting Post isn’t shouting into a void. There is a real possibility that what you write will be taken seriously. You can affect real decisions, real teams, and real careers.
When you’re a year or two in, in any career, the biggest risk is that you don’t know what you don’t know. And without someone experienced around to say, “hey, you’ve missed something”, it’s easy to build yourself up with enough confidence that it doesn’t matter. Your opinion, stated as fact, especially on social media, gets rewarded when stated with certainty, and punished for highlighting the nuance.
To be fair though, it’s not all on the 25 year old architects. The entire industry has always had a weird relationship with titles. “Senior” engineers at one company will be seen as “mid” level at another. “Tech lead”? That could mean you’re great at managing tickets and taking notes in 1:1s, or it might mean you own a multi-million dollar system. We don’t have standards. We have “vibe” career progression and job descriptions written by managers and recruiters who often aren’t technical.
Maybe the problem with our industry isn’t with the loudness of the naive, but with the quietness of the wise.
One skill that is often neglected throughout technical career tracks is the ability to mentor. How to translate our hard earned wisdom into teachings for the next generation.
How do we surface wisdom in an environment where social media algorithms reward loud certainty, regardless of correctness? The Dunning-Kruger effect on people’s confidence is real, and unfortunately, the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know. And this often results in the most experienced of us being unwilling to put their opinions in writing, as the only thing they can be sure of, is that people will disagree with them.
If you’ve been around a while, maybe this is the reminder to post more. Share your stories of hard won knowledge and experience. Show everyone your scars. Because experience matters.
Write the post you wish you’d read ten years ago. Because if we don’t shape the narrative, someone else will. And they might not even know what architecture is.
Remember, all the best people are mad.