Architecture Astronautism

Designing software architecture is a very important part of a developers life. However often - especially in large corporations it seems - you come across architectures that just suck. The problem with abstraction layers is that they kill performance smoothly layer by layer. Additionally they happen to do that in a way that makes it really hard to figure at which layer the performance is killed. Since you are caught in the game, the best thing you can do is add an abstraction layer, then put something fast below it to prove that it's not your fault that the application is just slow. In his legendary article about architecture astronauts Joel Spolsky writes:

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.

I think a big amount of the mess that I am currently in is caused by this kind of astronautism. We are constantly adding layers of abstraction but can't even fix the basics. I don't know if this would be fixed if we had less architects or the architects would actually write some code. I think we are beyond incremental fixes - we really need something radical. Press [Delete] and start from scratch - build an architecture that fixes one problem at a time and that doesn't try to fix problems that don't even exist.