Design Aristocracy

This topic has dwelled in my mind since my ThoughtWorks days.

How does a developer win the trust of colleagues in highly skilled teams? How does one qualify to contribute to the select group that seem to form the conceptual architecture and high-level design? Or even the low-level design?

From my experience, highly skilled working environments, with officially relatively flat organizational hierarchies - still subtly form a hierarchy. To earn respect you have to win respect. Fair enough to some degree, but still the lack of officiality is more likely to lead to emotionally charged decisions.

In XP practicing organizations, according to Beck (in true emergent fashion), every developer should perform a little architecture and design every day. Granted this should never be solo, unless you happen to be on a one man ‘team’. But, what do you do if there is a select, implicit, group governing the design. They may not be control freaks, they just see danger in granting developers too much freedom. Now, in an organization that lives by Becks model, having this implicit design group is a slur on the other developers, albeit intentionally or not. It’s a clear sign of a lack of trust.

I can understand the reasons for such groups being formed - it’s a way of reducing risk. There’s a confidence that the group will make the right decisions. But if you’re outside that group, and you want to be a part of making the decisions (just like Beck preaches), then, depending on how seriously you take your profession, it can hurt. It limits your technical/professional progression. It serves to alienate colleagues. Though the intentions are good in the outer it’s considered badness.

But it’s not all that bad. The days of the Whiteboard Architect aristocracy that Brooks pictured all those years ago are thankfully going the way of the Dodo. Yet I think we’re struggling to reach Becks vision. Perhaps there’s two barriers holding us back:

• A general lack of skill in the industry.
• Those considered highly skilled seem to have superiority complexes.

The pride and confidence of the highly skilled make it especially difficult to break into the upper escelon of the ‘technical heap’. Maybe one day the serfs will subtilely rebel.

Which is the lesser of the two evil barriers? You tell me. From where I stand one is just as evil as the other.