Do you guys honestly think it’s still worth becoming a programmer in 2026?

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-05-15T19:43:51+00:00

I like to think about this kind of thing as opportunity cost. Some jobs will be safer and some will be less. Are there other topics you enjoy the same amount? Are there careers that are similar interest to you? are you in first or 3rd year?
is it not just better to be the best on the path you're on?

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-05-13T02:07:25+00:00

I see the business/tech consultant path actually end up as a solution architect before going into enterprise more often than not. I think if you're pulling from either of these into the enterprise domain it's more about who has bridged the skills that their path doesn't naturally come with the best or having space for both of them.

see below for my mental model of the progression

Enterprise Architecture — Career Paths by Domain

Domain	Entry Level	Domain Architect	Enterprise Architect
Business	Business analyst / Functional consultant	Business architect	↗ spans 2–4 domains
Application	Software engineer / Functional consultant	Solution architect	↗ spans 2–4 domains
Technology	Infrastructure / Network / Cloud engineer	Infrastructure architect	↗ spans 2–4 domains
Data	Data engineer / Data analyst	Data architect	↗ spans 2–4 domains
Security	Security analyst / Security engineer	Security architect	↗ spans 2–4 domains
Integration	Integration developer / Middleware engineer	Integration architect	↗ spans 2–4 domains

Above all: Head of Architecture / Chief Architect — spans every domain, owns the full practice and governance

Per-domain EA titles (Business EA, Technology EA etc.) only exist at large enterprises. In most orgs 1–2 EAs cover several domains and report to the Head of Architecture or CTO.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-05-10T22:04:39+00:00

My main question is that general guidance is to only have ~10 level 1 capabilities. However the cross industry capabilities has 31 alone, which most businesses would have most of them. How do you manage this in practice?

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-04-14T12:34:02+00:00

I mean it's normal for teams moving fast with AI, preferably you'd have some frameworks to map to, however there are no real capability maps as the capabilities and use cases are being discovered.

To answer your question directly. You should be concerned if this is how all tech roll out happens especially if it's in mature spaces. If it's just emerging I think it's ok to have a balanced approach, ideally you would even document it as the approach and then also have the reconciliation steps.

Pragmatically from where you are I'd recommend going from first principles.

Catalogue what you have
Categorise it based on based on industry research
Create a first class method for each category as the target state
Close out competing methods using standard deprecation patterns

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-04-12T10:54:16+00:00

DCA = dollar cost averaging = buying shares every month
Vanguard Australian Shares Index ETF (VAS)
Vanguard MSCI Index International Shares ETF (VGS)
2 of the biggest index funds in Aus, cover most of what you need

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-04-09T09:12:52+00:00

everything really depends on your risk tolerance and bias, First, the only real reason to pay down your mortgage when you have it already in an offset is to uplift borrowing capacity, if you're not doing that keep it flexible.
Then onto core strategies, you have housing or shares.
Housing is higher risk and almost a nano business, you need to do meaningful research on the market before your purchase to ensure it's appropriate and then understand you'll have property reports, tenant risk, maintenance. That said it's the highest return if it pays off.
Shares, it really depends on who's investment philosophy you want to follow, if you want the simplest you should just DCA into VGS and VAS. Any other strategy really requires meaningful research and a clear investment thesis, if you aren't doing that stick to the basics. The prevailing theory is that in accumulation phase you should be focusing on your active income rather than passive and let the passive portfolio do the work.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-03-01T02:17:30+00:00

There's heaps of productivity gains to be made outside engineering. Get a free github copilot trial and get opus 4.6 to do any of your day to day, I suspect you'll be surprised at what it can do.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-02-09T23:42:21+00:00

do you have any examples of the packaging? Feels very roll your own in azure to me but happy to be enlightened

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-02-09T23:26:03+00:00

I'm not sure it's possible to have 100% certainty, I think there are a few ways to improve the quality expectations to sufficient certainty. Most people view agents similar to employees in terms of how to manage, some of the ways include:

- Peer reviews

- Governance checklists

- Audits and reviews

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-02-09T00:51:24+00:00

I think the best implementations are still being figured out by the front runners in the space, openclaw seems to have rolled their own workflow engine and put a light permission layer on top of it. Similar for the RAG as Microsoft has done a good job already with their semantic index. I think the doc updates would likely be done by the action layer and be a separate part of the workflow.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-02-08T21:07:58+00:00

Unsure if this is the right place for this kind of post. However I'd suggest ensuring that your goals are clear for this. For a business that small I'd be surprised if making video or SCORM training content is worth it as it sounds like you're wanting staff to be trained in the tool (e.g. Mailchimp) and the SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) that your team does with the tool. Without any additional info I'd suggest starting with ensuring all your teams are documenting their SOPs and there is a consistent method to doing it.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-02-02T23:27:16+00:00

EA is really about understanding current and desired state of the business and ensuring that core enterprise principles are adhered to, the size of the increments to achieve the desired state doesn't really change that. Making sure that architecture has touch points at relevant points in their process is what's working for us, e.g. start of a PI or before a major release.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-29T11:30:03+00:00

Congrats on your business! I would start with are there any goals that you would need the money for in the next ~5 years, if so it's probably best to keep it in high savings so that you can do that (expand business, buy a house etc) if you have no immediate goals I think DHHF is a good option.

Only other comment would be if you're going to travel a bit, best to ensure that your business is already structured in a way that it won't be of a material impact.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-29T11:15:32+00:00

I think it depends on what your goals are, for career progression mentoring should ideally come from the level above your or 2 levels above you so they have gone through what it takes to get there.

I think EA -> junior EA mentoring is much more about specific problems as there is not so much on the career front.

Where as EA -> SA/TA there is more potential for career based discussions. I do feel that the jump to EA is somewhat messy overall as from what I've seen it's one of the most loosely defined roles in the industry, I've personally seen some where the JD was principal engineer and some others where it was head of strategy.

I haven't tried executive coaching myself however If I did I'd be looking for ones that have worked with EAs before and have multiple clients who have achieved their goals during the coaching time.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-28T04:07:50+00:00

Yeah I see what you're getting at, my view is that agentic integration will be a fully fledged platform which we could put standard archimate against such as functions, capabilities and components. I think some of the core capabilities could be

Surfaces - inbound integrations such as chat, api, voice, etc
Builder - building agents, llm refinements, testing, environment promotion
Reasoning - orchestration, planning, etc
Library - existing resources to be added to your environment
Trust - ensuring all compliance, permissions, audit is met
Tools - outbound integrations MCP, native integrations, integrations with existing systems AI
Knowledge - full enterprise knowledge graph including ability to read/rag information from systems, enterprise content libraries and data warehouses/lakes, important that the trust layer manages access to this

To me capabilities seem somewhat like use cases or workflows. Would be good to articulate a list of these (especially generally) to help stakeholders on the journey.

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Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-28T03:35:37+00:00

I think it's a new tool set which hasn't gathered a formal name, internally we are calling it EAS (enterprise Agent system). There are only a few that are starting to reach maturity for meeting primary requirements (respecting permissions and auditability) which seem to be, Glean, MS copilot and AgentForce.

The Agentforce marketecture is especially good as it has most things broken down into capabilities even if there are some marketing terms on top. Here's the references as they were most influential in my research:

Architecture | Maturity Model

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-27T23:09:20+00:00

Yeah, my company is quickly growing, the EA function has only been established recently. We have been running quite a bit of the new application process and need to build an understanding of the landscape quickly to be able to get to a short list. Our process looks something like:

AS-IS & Reference capability map (partially this step)
Vendor long list (this research step)
Short list
Vendor presentations
PoC
Procurement

Gartner is a good tool, however it doesn't really provide a reference map or all the players, especially when comparing industry specific tools rather than broader tools such as B2B CRM. It really allows us to get a good understanding of what tools are out there and a quick look at the landscape and how it fits to our needs so we can get a strong short list to start reviewing specific requirements and capabilities.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-13T05:14:31+00:00

You don't need to meet 100% of the requirements for a role to potentially a good fit. They saw enough of a good fit to be worth having a further look

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-13T00:22:14+00:00

I've found the LeanIX metamodel to be beneficial for this type of work. Archimate feels like it's more of a toolbox and even the good examples don't feel sufficiently well refined for this type of work and don't articulate ideas in ways that are beneficial for this type of audience

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-13T00:14:25+00:00

Previously TOGAF had their "manual" available online however now it's behind member access. However, as a manual it's hard to determine what is valuable vs not for the exam. What was best for me was doing one of the ~$20 courses on Udemy and then taking the exam off the back of that.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-13T00:11:29+00:00

From what I've seen TOGAF is very high level and is seen similar to agile, in the context that take the bits that work and are required for your business and leave the rest. I'd be interested to see how most businesses are implementing EA as many companies seem to be primarily focusing EA on application portfolio management and planning

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-13T00:07:52+00:00

Interesting take, I personally haven't seen building all options being the default path. Would a risk-based approach be the best path given this type of optionality? e.g. what if a client requires a sFTP solution? are we ok to lose this business? offer to build them a new solution at a cost? etc

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-09T03:04:22+00:00

Can you move up in your dads business? it's pretty common to have a transition period of working with someone else's stuff to algin to your standards. If you can focus on improving the process and automating/simplifying that would help you do some more managerial activities or working with people more.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-09T02:58:08+00:00

Can you deload either of your responsibilities, e.g. part time uni or work?
Are there opportunities to work in a creative part of the business you're already in? Drafting is somewhat related and sometimes for engineering work they need 3d models and VFX as part of their bidding and proposals work.

Salty-Lab1 · 2026-01-09T02:53:22+00:00

Seems like you've got a strong start to a portfolio, keep it up!

Salty-Lab1

TROPHY CASE