1.1 - Leaving the architect role: Facing your weaknesses
For a long time, my career looked great from the outside. I climbed the ladder, received impressive titles, and earned a high salary. But behind the scenes, I was running away from a truth I didn’t want to face. This is the story of how I ended up in the wrong role, burned out, and finally found the courage to admit my weaknesses.
The frontend trap and the illusion of success
I started my career as a software engineer with a strong focus on frontend development. After about five years of building user interfaces, I began learning backend development to broaden my skills. However, before I could dive deep into backend systems, leadership opportunities kept pulling me back. Because of my experience, I was appointed as a Frontend Lead.
Suddenly, I was wearing multiple hats at the same time. A high salary and a prestigious title blinded me from reality. I thought I was moving forward, but I was actually losing my technical focus. Instead of deep-diving into complex system design, core software architecture, and hands-on coding, my time was completely fragmented by the endless, nameless tasks of managing a frontend team.
The architecture of patches
The tech market eventually shifted, and frontend-heavy roles faced massive layoffs. To survive, I had to move to other companies. In these new environments, organizations were specifically looking for Team Leads and Software Architects.
Armed with high years of experience on paper but patchy, fragmented technical knowledge, I officially began my career as an Architect.
Instead of building robust platforms from scratch, my day-to-day job consisted of repairing and fixing architectures left behind by engineers who had quit. I stepped in to fill the gaps, patched the broken pieces, and kept the legacy systems running. The hard truth was: I made the systems work, but I did not truly understand how they operated deep down.
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title: The Legacy Cycle
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flowchart LR
A[Inheritance] --> B[Patching]
B --> C[Maintenance]
C --> D[Zero Deep Understanding]
For small and simple architectures, this survival strategy worked. I managed to get by. But the moment I clashed with massive, high-scale engineering problems, my lack of deep architectural thinking and real-world large-system experience caught up with me. I faced constant friction and structural difficulties.
The vortex of hiding and burnout
Instead of stepping back, swallowing my pride, and taking the time to relearn the fundamentals, I chose to look for a way out. I used my years of experience on my CV and the professional reputation I built over the years to secure new roles.
For several years in a row, I fell into a toxic pattern:
Concealing Weaknesses: I spent immense mental energy trying to hide what I didn’t know.
Patching Knowledge: I tried to learn complex concepts on the fly just to survive meetings.
Short Tenures: Due to a difficult tech market and economic conditions, I didn't stay at companies long enough to see systems grow.
These objective factors, combined with my own choices, pulled me into a dangerous vortex. I was drowning in administrative management rather than doing actual, high-quality technical work. The result was inevitable: severe burnout, chronic stress, and exhaustion.
The day of radical honesty
One day, the exhaustion became too heavy to carry. I decided to stop running. I sat down and looked directly at the problem with absolute honesty.
I had to admit a painful fact: I was not a good Software Architect.
My biggest weakness was the total lack of hands-on experience in independently designing, building, and scaling large-scale systems from the ground up. The architectural knowledge I possessed was merely a collection of patches scraped together from systems other people built, left behind, and tasked me to maintain.
Admitting this was painful, but it was also the exact moment my transformation began. By accepting that I was not meant to be an Architect, I cleared the path to discover where my true value lied: as an Engineering Manager who understands the exact pain of technical gaps and knows how to lead the people behind the code.
🎯 Self-Reflection for You
If you are reading this and feeling a familiar weight in your chest, ask yourself these questions:
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Are you staying in your current technical role because you truly love the work, or are you just afraid of what people will think if you step down?
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Look at your daily schedule: Are you actually deep-coding and designing systems, or are you just running around fixing fires and patching things up?
Accepting your technical limitations is the first step toward genuine leadership. If you are trapped in a similar loop and need an honest, confidential space to unpack your career path, let’s connect in a virtual coffee chat.