Discover Financial

The salary was fantastic compared to industry comparables.

The position was not what I discussed during the interview process. I was led to believe the position would be hands-on, and it turned into a governance position.

Culture was challenging to adapt to, with knowledge gatekeeping and overlapping responsibilities that left people feeling their job was at risk. In addition, the long-term commitment expressed to remote working during interviews was eliminated within months of starting.

Lastly, principal devs were not able to solve code issues that were dumped on architects (many with no coding experience working as architects for years at Discover) with no experience in the system. They were somehow expected to fix the problem for developers that were in the system in question every day. This makes little or no sense.

Make sure candidates understand role responsibilities before hiring.

In addition, upper management needs to work with teams to change the culture towards acceptance of architects in the process (development teams did not want architects involved and if felt forced).

Frankly, with all the knowledge gatekeeping, there is no good way for an architect to be effective.

Finally, don’t expect an architect to come in and fix day-to-day issues developers with more experience working in the system cannot fix themselves.

Perhaps hire more tenured developers?

Architects should be doing PoCs and guiding implementation of solutions and cloud services necessary to satisfy some need.

Break-fix support is frankly not what they are hired for and was not shared at any point in the hiring process.