I found out second-hand that the platform my old R&D team had been building was scrapped. The tooling meant to carry a hundred-odd engineers off a PHP monolith and onto Go services, gone. They kept the monolith.
It stung, and I'd love to say all of the sting was aimed at whoever made the call. The longer I chewed on it, the more it pointed back at me.
That team's work was scaffolding. It's in every progress photo of a building site and nobody looks at it once. It costs money every week it stays up, it isn't what anybody ordered, and it's the obvious thing to take down when the budget gets tight.
Their value only ever showed up in someone else's numbers. Turning "this will make the whole department faster" into a number the business already cared about was my job as chief architect, and I didn't do it. "It'll be obvious later" is more of a hope than a case.
Given my time again, I'd run a second stream: pick a few systems that are really hurting, measure them, rebuild them on the unfinished platform, measure again. One finished room you can walk a stakeholder into.
#SoftwareArchitecture #PlatformEngineering #EngineeringLeadership #Microservices #GlueWork
https://phpboyscout.uk/nobody-photographs-the-scaffolding/