She Spent Years Watching Architects Lose Their Spark

There is a version of career progression that looks like success from the outside and feels like erosion from the inside: you get more senior, you sit in more meetings, you write less software, and eventually someone asks whether you'd like to become an architect. Most people in that position have already watched what happens to the ones who said yes.

Larisa Feldman joined Andrew, Andrea, and Kenny to tell a story that doesn't begin with a design problem — it begins with a decision she kept refusing to make. Over 18 years at National Australia Bank, she worked alongside integration, solution, domain, and enterprise architects, and she noticed a pattern: "they start very happy and they become quite sad." Their clear, well-reasoned visions kept getting stripped back by a mainframe that couldn't cope, an old system that wouldn't integrate, priorities that never arrived. As a senior and then principal engineer, Larisa was the one explaining how the systems actually worked before any design conversation could start — using a floppy disk as her analogy for why mobile isn't a website deployment. But she never wanted the title. As she put it, the sadness in the architects' eyes protected her.

What eventually changed her mind wasn't ambition. After leaving financial services for REA Group — no change panels, no product/tech split, everything straight to production — she was offered an architecture role on a modernisation programme. The pull was specific: "an opportunity to actually do something the way I wanted it to, rather than do it as another architect suggests." She became an architect almost by accident, but not without reason — and now measures the role by a single test: is the architecture making engineers' lives better, or harder?

This conversation explores what the architect role actually is and who it's actually for. We dig into Gregor Hohpe's "do we want architects or do we want architecture?", the case for advisor roles over architect titles, Kenny's analogy of decisions made by someone from a distant village with authority but no context, and why writing things down turns out to be an architectural act in its own right.

Key Discussion Points

• [00:01] The Reluctant Architect: Larisa frames a story that isn't about designing a system, but about years of deliberately refusing the role
• [02:00] From Steel Plants to Software: an electro-mechanical degree in a collapsing Soviet economy and an accidental route into writing code
• [05:00] "Let Me Tell You How Mobile Works": translating system constraints to architects who arrived without context — and the floppy-disk analogy that stuck
• [08:00] The Sadness That Protected Her: why the bank's architects started happy and ended demoralised, and why that kept Larisa saying no
• [10:00] Architects or Architecture?: Kenny raises Gregor Hohpe's distinction; Larisa on why an architect who still wants to code is probably in the right job
• [13:00] Advisor, Not Architect: the slightly controversial idea that some senior engineers contribute more from an advisory seat than from a room full of stakeholders
• [19:00] Self-Fulfilling Roles and the Next Village: roles that stop enabling teams and start justifying themselves — authority without context
• [22:00] Learning Not to Be Blunt: influence across stakeholder levels, writing to crystallise what only she knew, and architecture as the glue between engineers and leadership

Guest: Larisa Feldman

Hosts: Andrew Harmel-Law, Kenny Schwegler, Andrea Magnorsky