Orchestras
Occasionally I get asked what I do for a living, and it's getting harder and harder to explain. I don't write all that much code, any more. I spend a lot of time drawing boxes on whiteboards, and asking people to explain what they really want a system or service to do. And then there's the time spent just talking, either one-to-one or in a bigger group.
What I do seems to be useful, because things eventually happen - but it's really hard to pin down exactly what my contribution is in all of this.
I've been struggling to find a way of describing all of that, or at least being able to explain succinctly what being a CTO stroke head of engineering stroke manager actually means.
The closest I've come to is the conductor of an orchestra. I know how the symphony sounds - that's what the product or service actually needs to do. And I know how the individual instruments combine to produce the overall sound - that's the architectural components that we're building. And I can modulate the volume or the tempo of the music - which is the subtler aspects of user experience or site performance under load.
But even though I could explain all of these to an individual musician, I can't pick up a trumpet and produce the sounds myself. So I need an expert to write the service that connects to the datastore, or provision the instances that will load balance the traffic, or arrange the menu items in a way that makes sense to an end-user interacting with the app while waiting for a bus.
In some ways, it can be frustrating - if only I could
But in other ways, the potential frustrations of that indirect influence is outweighed by what can be achieved as a team of contrasting and complementary skills. Just an orchestra at full blast is more impressive than an individual plunking away at a single instrument. And my team would probably say I wave my hands around as much as a conductor on the rostrum, too.