Architecting

As soon as we get done architecting, let’s make sure we think about the electricianing and the paintering.

All three of these -ing words sound equally silly to me, but only one of them has become a mainstay of corporate jargon. Architecting was introduced to corporate America by software engineers who wanted to explain that they were building something, but there was a lot of planning and thought behind it.

Think about it: a builder grabs some wood and starts making a house, but an architect draws a bunch of plans first. Architecting became shorthand for building a complex project with code throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, and then it was adopted by C-suites and managerial teams during the 2010s.

This isn’t the first time architect has been used as a verb, though. All the way back in 1818, the poet John Keats commented on a great cave that nature seemed to have built with some foresight in mind:

This was architectured thus / By the great Oceanus!

Notice: Keats turns architect (a person) into a verb, but it’s no architected. The world would have to wait another 180 years to hear its full form.

By the 1990s, there was a lot of software code out there. The job of organizing all that data into useful bits that could work together was monumental. It was its own thing now, and it was called software architecture. In order to not be confused with mere building work, these folks began to talk about their work as architecting.

Writing code used to be the thing, but it’s only part of the thing now. Architecting is the other part.