> 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.
Joel was wrong about one thing, they also work at startups. My roommate worked at a startup where the senior frontend developer was basically building react in svelte + zod. Once a week he would see all his work deleted and completely rewritten in a fever dream PR that the senior produced. Completely impossible for grug developer to follow what's going on, his job eventually became "running this guy's code through chatgpt and adding comments and documentation".
