Hubris

I mentioned a solution architect yesterday and how they needed to be the person with the vision, the person that led the team to final solution.  Well, there is one character trait that a lot of solution architects have that needs to be understood and managed.

Hubris.

Defined as "excessive pride", many solution architects are unwilling to admit they are wrong and will go to any lengths to avoid admitting that they made a mistake.  Sometimes these mistakes can be trivial and sometimes they can be the smallest of decisions that has the biggest of impacts.  Case in point: on a very large project I was working on the solution architect decided that the default order the client had been using for the past 75 years was not right.  So, in the system that we were using he decided that we should change the order of the day, month,and year in the fields that we displayed on the screen.   Yes, that's right, instead of YYMMDD or MMDDYY, he chose a new way of ordering the parts of the date.

This may seem trivial, but we were using a code generator to build the cod and another tool to help create the CICS screens (yes, it was a very old system).  As a result, we had to customize the tool to make it work properly.  OK, it was up to me to make it work properly.  Oh, yay.  Suffice to say that we spent significantly more time on making our dates work out than we would have if we had followed, not just what the client had previously used, but a format that was in use in North America.

No one could convince him he was wrong.  No one at all.  He was convinced that he was right and the rest of the world was wrong.  I know what you're thinking, Don, was he really wrong?  Wasn't this sort of decision part of his job?  I would agree with you, but for those of you old enough to remember, the Y2K scare in the IT field was a big thing.  Imagine a solution architect in the early 90's designing a system where you were unable to enter the century!!!!!  We (okay, me again) had to devise complex schemes that would accurately take a 2 digit year and add the correct century to it.

Solution architects are good, sometimes absolutely necessary, but they are also prone to making very silly mistakes.