During COVID, I attended training on software/enterprise architecture given by Mark Richards. One of the things he pointed out that differentiates an architect from a senior administrator/developer/engineer is that an architect must develop a breadth of knowledge which comes at the cost of depth. For instance, a senior server administrator may know the details of the OS at a level that is just not sustainable for an architect because an architect has to learn and understand more of the overall ecosystem. While architects do have their specialties, the time isn’t there to maintain deep, deep knowledge. For instance, before I was an architect, I had received training on Windows internals and felt confident of my knowledge. I won’t make the claim today that I maintain current knowledge on Windows internals.
That means as an architect, I’m often asking for help to understand deeper than what I currently know. I rely on experts in the various areas to provide their input and expert opinion, especially if I’m trying to develop a workable solution to a problem. I know early on my career I had the mindset that I needed to figure out and understand everything on my own. That may have been effective in narrow areas back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it’s a recipe for disaster now. The problem with trying to do everything yourself is you often don’t know what you don’t know. You have blind spots. Even if you are an expert, the old saying about two sets of eyes being better than one holds true. We are human and we make mistakes, miss things, overlook or underestimate things that might be significant, etc. Therefore, even if you are the expert, it still is good to have someone else look over anything important.
I’ve learned to apply this to life, too. For instance, my family recently went through the exercise of buying a new to us minivan. We knew what brand and model we wanted and we had a ballpark for cost. However, the car market has changed drastically over the last 5-10 years and there’s a lot to consider: new vs. used, features based on the year (like changes in engines), different “trim” options, maintenance records, reputation of the seller/dealership, etc. Knowing we needed help, we utilized one of the services of our credit union and worked with an expert in automotive purchases to finally select and purchase a vehicle. I know that if we didn’t utilize that service and interact with that expert, if we had a car now, we would have spent a lot more. I am glad we reached out for help.
If you’ve had the mindset that accepting help is a weakness, you need to break from that. We all need help, and we often should ask for and accept help more than we should. There’s a corollary that we should also try to help when we can, but that’s a separate post.