architecture astronaut

plural architecture astronauts

1. derogatorycomputingSomeone who focuses excessively on creating complex software abstractions, rather than on creating practical and useful products.

   1 more example

   When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all. ¶ These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It's very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won't stop thinking about Architecture. They're astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don't know how they're breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don't contribute to the bottom line.

   [2001 April 21, Joel Spolsky, “Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You”, in Joel on Software, archived from the original on 21 Sep 2026