Nearly 30 years ago, I handed my father’s watch to a professional watchmaker for a routine service.
When I came back for it, he put it on the counter and said nothing. And to my horror, the crystal was shattered. The hands were missing. The dial was scratched, the case bent. Irreparably damaged, he told me.
I was twenty years old.
I’m 14, and I’ve already chosen what to do the rest of my life. Next year, the Tunisian educational system will ask me to pick a stream: maths, science or literature.
Nobody needs to ask. It’s maths, because maths leads to engineering school, and engineering school leads to computers.
I know nothing about salaries, job markets or what a software engineer does all day. But all I know is that it’s the path to follow to my dream job.
The manager called me in.
I already knew.
I’d known for weeks, in the way you know something before you’re willing to say it out loud.
The conversation was ten minutes.
The decision had already been made, by both of us, long before that.
I was in the war room at 2 AM, staring to the aftermath of what was supposed to be our next evolutionary leap.
We pushed the final piece of our cloud migration at midnight.
By 12:07 AM, 60% of our customers couldn’t log in.
By 12:15 AM, the rollback plan failed because the servers it was meant to restore to didn’t even exist anymore.
Despite the thorough migration plan, the old system was gone … extinct in a single night, and our “evolved” architecture had nowhere to run.
We didn’t anticipate the blind spots, and the post-mortem read like a crime scene report where we were both the victim and the suspect.
That’s when I realised Darwin’s theory applied to software too: Software behaves like living organisms.
So there I was, 8 years old, dragged to the shopping center by my dad because, apparently, shopping for socks is a family event. We’re walking through this temple of consumerism when—BAM!—I spot a computer showroom. Not just any computers. MSX/Sakhr machines .
If, after quitting your job, you hear or get notified about your ex-leader doing these :
These behaviours scream insecurity, selfishness, and a lack of confidence in building and retaining talent. They crush team morale, erode trust, and send a clear message to the rest of the team: ‘You’re disposable too.’
After a heavy lunch break with a team, Dorian, one (among others) young and competent developer, enthusiastically asked me: “How does someone become an Architect, and what’s the path to follow and what to learn to be one?”
I wasn’t asked this question for the first time, and to be honest, I was never able to answer it properly.
As I am in my late 40ies, I’ll be closing my 25th year as an IT engineer this year and my 20th year as an architect.
As I was reflecting about the journey, I wondered: Am I really a Senior or just a Vintage, a Relic?
We often tend to think that a person with considerable years of experience is usually a respected Senior (as a rank and age), but Experience in some careers is viewed as universally positive, but that’s not necessarily the case in tech.
In other careers, the craft matures. It becomes less technical and more artistic, and people gain more knowledge while effortlessly getting things done.
Lawyers and doctors are respected when they cross into their 50’s. They are held in high esteem. Tech workers don’t collectively share the same belief.
In our case, the rapid change in technologies and tools, plus the weird label that stuck to us as technology handlers, are making us prone to being obsolete in a few years, if not months.
During an after-work with some dear colleagues, one asked: “How can we define our success?”.
People started throwing answers like : by the customer’s happiness, by listing the greatest achievements, the metrics hit, by the completed tasks and goals, the career evolution or even by the gain accumulated.
Unsurprisingly, I was unsatisfied. These answers looked more like a standard pitch to succeed in an interview rather than deep thoughts.
In my opinion, one’s success can’t be measured only by corporate expectations; a career can’t be measured only by goals, achievements or accumulated wealth; a professional can’t be successful only by positive feedback or customer satisfaction.
And what about Architects, as the disgraced-and-always-blamed people in an organization ?
How can they measure their successes, especially since they only provide listening, more questions and rarely one option?
Most architects get pushed toward deeper specialisation over time. I went the other way, and I’ve grown comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with it.
The word “polyglot” has drifted well beyond its linguistic origins. For me, it describes an approach that values breadth over depth in any single stack.