This is a little esoteric, but I believe in it fully…
In Vitruvius’ Ten Book on Architecture, Chapter 1, The Education of the Architect, Vitruvius calls for a wide foundation of knowledge for the architect, including art, math, history, philosophy, music, and medicine. That a good architect should strive for a breadth of applicable knowledge.
He also points out the usefulness of understanding the nature of practice and theory in all of these subjects, that a balance should be maintained.
2. It follows, therefore, that architects who have aimed at acquiring manual skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains, while those who relied only upon theories and scholarship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance. But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all points, have the sooner attained their object and carried authority with them.
I would argue that the same logic is very well applied to our occupation today, in that over-specialization is not particularly suited to success. That is, EA practitioners are IMHO better as generalists, with a breadth of knowledge, both technical, and non-technical.
For my part, I typically look for experience and success in the following areas:
- business (corporate and entrepreneurial)
- software development (multiple languages and types [OO, functional])
- systems administration
- creativity and problem solving skills
- engineering
- open source
- open standards
- development methodology
- Unix/Linux
- marketing
- writing
- speaking/presenting
- more…
In the real world, I see too many architects relying upon theory alone (hunting the shadow as it were), create problems for themselves and their teams. For this reason, I’m a big fan of the people at CodingTheArchitecture.
Ten Books on Architecture from Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/
Originally Posted by john joseph roets at the-enterprise-architecture-network Google group, an example of reuse in writing.
Post in complete context here:
http://tinyurl.com/a8w5tk