Ignore Culture

If something is wrong. Say something, do something. When you ignore problems consistently over a long period of time, you end up developing an anti-pattern, which I call “Ignore Culture”. When you ignore warnings in the build, when you ignore old versions of libraries, when you ignore anti-patterns on the code. When you ignore production monitoring. When you ignore requirements that make no sense.

Does not matter if you were the one who did the code or not. You must take ownership and under your watch you should ignore nothing.

Ignoring can become a culture because managers can easily do this. Engineers, often pressured by managers also can ignore several wrong things. What’s wrong should not be ignored, it should be fought and pushed back.

Lack of fighting for what is right is immaturity. As an architect you must not ignore what’s wrong. Do not let this become a culture. Ignore culture can happen so easily when people say “It’s not my job”, or “It’s not my code” or “It’s not my project” or “It’s not my responsibility”, the extreme lack of ownership can lead to ignore culture. When you are ignoring problems you are making fertile ground for anti-patterns to grow. Tech debt plague requires ignore culture to thrive.

Why you need to know this?

Because you will very likely see this happen in a small or large scale. The question is how you behave. Yes, an architect must care about culture. Caring is the first step to change. You can’t change just with software and technology you must address culture by being part of the change you want see.

An architect is a leader, it’s a teacher, therefore it must set an example of caring, passion, and action-oriented behavior. Even if little, every PR counts, every little improvement counts.