> (...) I had to deal with an "Architecture Team" full of Very Senior(tm) people who would show up uninvited and give advice like "did you know you can pee and poo at the same time?"
It reads like you had experts giving you advise on how to improve things, and instead not only did you ignored their advise but you went to the extent of mindlessly disparaging their help.
Nah, the other commenter had described the situation exactly right - after dropping the comments, the "A-Team" disappeared for a few months and never revisited our responses. It really feels like an archetype common at many companies.
They were doing it just to boost their egos and most of the teams in the company learned to ignore them. When the company ownership changed, the "A-Team" was the first under the chopping block because the new owners correctly saw that the high status they had was simply due to inertia of being first devs at the company and were not fullfiling any meaningful role in the present.
They accurately describe a particular type of person/role that exists at many large enterprises. These "architects" notionally have a lot of authority, appointed by other not very technical people, but are so divorced from the realities of the engineering execution that anything they tell you is mostly useless. In my experience it tends to be a refuge for people that aren't very strong technically but who enjoy making slide decks for management.
My first boss had the title 'architect', but he was actually very competent, and very regularly got his hands dirty coding.
(But at the time, I basically joined what was still essentially a startup just after they had been acquired by a larger company. I think the titles like 'architect' might have come from the larger company, but the competence came from them still being the same people as at the startup.)
I'm currently at a very large company, and architects are, in many lines of business, the only technical folks directly employed by the company. Which means a product's quality hinges pretty directly on whether your architect is somebody technical who can help solve problems both at the implementation level and before they get to the implementation level (which I certainly try to be, when not triple-booked on meetings trying to keep everything else on the rails) or the Dilbert version.
We do exist, I promise. ;) But in my case at least, the Eye of Sauron can only keep so many things in sight at a time...
It reads like you had experts giving you advise on how to improve things, and instead not only did you ignored their advise but you went to the extent of mindlessly disparaging their help.