Senior Architect

At work this past Friday I was informed the Technology Department (about 75% of the company) is being restructured.  As such, my department —Engineering Practices is being disbanded and my employee's reassigned to someone else.  Fear not, Kevin isn't winding up unemployed (yet again), but rather is being moved from his management position to the position of "Senior Architect".  I guess one can view this move as either a) a demotion (removed from management), b) a lateral move (from manager to Sr. technical staff) or c) a promotion (for the same reason).  Personally I believe it to be "b" or "c" as either way this is a tremendous opportunity for me and show somebody believes I know what I am doing.  :)

For more than the past year, my department was responsible for three areas: code review (enforce coding standards and looking for stupid mistakes), release engineering (management of our software and it's distribution) and bug repair (fixing other's mistakes after release).  Over the past several months we have been overwhelmed with the demands from other departments and I had been in discussions with my boss as to how to remedy the situation.   And although I had buy-in from him on how we should fix the problems, other more fundamental issues also needed to be addresses within our organization.  So, in an effort to fix my department's problems and others within Technology, a complete restructuring is being undertaken.

In my new job I will be retaining a portion of the code review responsibilities along with writing technical specifications and determining the overall direction of our software products and how we build them.  This job is in tandem with another Senior Architect who is currently overloaded and will now share responsibilities with me.  In short we are combining my original code review job with his architect job.  Needless to say Kevin is both very excited and scared to death with this opportunity.

From a career perspective this is a very good move for me (baring failure) as this is a very high level software engineering position.  One of the problems in my previous role (through no fault of mine) was my inability to effectively perform both a technical role (code review) and a managerial role.  This change will again allow me again to focus strictly on the technical aspects of my job and the needs of the company and not have to deal with constant interruptions and managing the personnel issues of others.  Time will tell how this all works out.  :)

June 4, 2006 @ 10:43 am | Category:
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