Frederick's delirious rantings

Enterprise architects often hide behind "it depends" and over-engineer for hypothetical future scenarios, creating unnecessary complexity and maintenance burden. Drawing from the YAGNI principle in software development, architects should make opinionated decisions based on current business needs rather than building multiple options "just in case." Technology can be made swappable, but organizations rarely are—the real cost lies in training, processes, and organizational change, not technical implementation. Making clear architectural choices and building simply for today's requirements leads to lower costs, faster delivery, and systems that actually serve the business.

Bring back opinionated architecture

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architects should make opinionated decisions based on current business needs rather than building multiple options “just in case.”
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It’s actually exactly the purpose of architects, think long term try to identify trends and ensure that the product can evolve over time and do not get jailed into very specific solutions implementations specifics.
So many times I had to switch from one DB to another, from one broker to another.
When architects did their job, we could smoothly change.
When not… it was a year long project.

I think part of the problem is that some people in higher positions are either not natural leaders or just incompetent and don’t want to create systems when they can just gaslight the entire company and have control in the first place. Overall, I agree with your sentiment.