Suppose you are the architect being hired. What questions would you ask about the company with which you’re interviewing, related to the areas listed in Section 25.2? Try to answer this question from the point of view of an architect early in their career, and then from the point of view of a highly skilled architect with many years of experience.

Section 25.2 

Organizations, by their practices and structure, can either help or hinder architects in performing their duties. For example, if an organization has a career path for architects, that will motivate employees to become architects. If an organization has a standing architecture review board, then the project architect will know how and with whom to schedule a review. The absence of these practices and structures will mean that an architect has to fight battles with the organization or determine how to carry out a review without internal guidance. It makes sense, therefore, to ask whether a particular organization is architecturally competent and to develop instruments whose goal is measuring the architectural competence of an organization. The architectural competence of organizations is the topic of this section. Here is our definition:

The architectural competence of an organization is the ability of that organization to grow, use, and sustain the skills and knowledge necessary to effectively carry out architecture-centric practices at the individual, team, and organizational levels to produce architectures with acceptable cost that lead to systems aligned with the organization’s business goals.

Organizations have duties, skills, and knowledge for architecture, just like individual architects. For example, adequately funding the architecture effort is an organizational duty, as is effectively using the available architecture workforce (by appropriate teaming and other means). These are organizational duties because they are outside the control of individual architects. An organization-level skill might be effective knowledge management or human resource management as applied to architects. An example of organizational knowledge is the composition of an architecture-based life-cycle model that software projects may employ.