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you mean a real architect

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2020.08.04

I was talking with my "dotted line" boss in Europe in our regular biweekly call on Monday. It happens at 08:30 his time, and he asked me about my weekend. I told him that our son had gotten into the school we'd hope for, explaining that it was attached to a technical university and that my son wanted to be an architect.

At that, the fellow looked up sharply and said, "You mean a real architect?"

That's right, no one grows up thinking they want to be the kind of "architect" that he and I are, alternately producing schematics for IT systems that will never be built, or dealing with the grab-bag of technical and organizational debt across the firm as what my boss has called a "human garburator". Hopefully my son will do something productive with his life.

rand()m quote

The human capacity to ignore inconvenient facts and avoid unpleasantness is immense

—John Walker, from the Hacker's Diet