An architect should not write code

At one big company where I worked, the prevailing belief was that an architect should not write code. Remarkably, the principle was pushed by the architects themselves, who treated the activity as somewhat beneath them.

The consensus went like this: an architect should write specifications, draw diagrams, and so on, often in PowerPoint (Lord have mercy), because the sight of UML made managers furrow their brows in puzzlement.

But I quickly learned that the first thing a programmer does when faced with a diagram, or a hundred pages of a Software Architecture Document, is close it and bury it in the furthest folder so it will not clutter up grep; and there it meets its inglorious end.

So my specifications ended up looking something like this:

namespace core {

// Use this fucking visitor pattern to traverse the fucking tree

struct Smelly;
struct Old;
struct Shit;

struct FuckingVisitor {
    virtual void fuck(const Smelly&) = 0;
    virtual void fuck(const Old&) = 0;
    virtual void fuck(const Shit&) = 0;
};

} // namespace core

And it actually worked. Alas, it did nothing for my KPI.