Confessions of a Necromancer - Hintjens.com

I’ve worked in the weirdest possible projects, with crews of all sorts. There has always been a thread of insanity in our business. We’re hooked on doing the impossible. Clients lie to themselves that they’ve hired a team that know what they’re doing. The team lie to their clients that they’re in control. The sales people lie. The marketing department lies.

Most of the time, most large software projects fail, and this is still true in 2016. Yet for most of my career, my special talent was to make projects work, no matter how impossible the technical challenges. I am a really good technical architect, able to understand systems at the lowest and the highest levels. I can write all the code myself, or I can explain to people exactly what to make, and it all fits together like laser-cut blocks.

It took me decades to realize that technology is a slave to personality. It doesn’t matter how good the design, when there are unresolved problems in the organization.

And so gradually I shifted from technical architect to social architect. From caring about technical designs to caring about people and the psychology that drives them. Because in the end, this is what seems to make the difference between a working project and a failure.