Developer - Architect divide?

Here are 2 sample feedbacks I received from my session at TechEd 2 days ago.

 

8	8	8	9	8	This was a good architecture talk. I wish some of my firm's enterprise architects had been there to see it. The concepts even apply to a heterogeneous systems environment, like ours, which I found refreshing at a Microsoft conference.
1	1	3	5	1	Was extremely boring and abstract.

 

I initially thought: “Well you can’t please everybody”; but then I read other comments:

 

8	8	8	9	8	This is another very good session. Very informative and very well presented.
4	3	8	7	3	For me personally the session was too abstract.

 

And again and again; I had these very divergent opinions (fortunately the majority was of the former type J)

 

Based on this feedback, it is clear to me that there is a real divide between developers and architects in what they look for in a session. My session was 100% about architecture, patterns and best practices; no code, no Visual Studio etc… I spent most of my time on the issues that people should think about when designing connected systems; how to go about it and exposing a new set of issues introduced by connecting sytems together and very little on dev level how-to.

 

The architects loved it; the dev hated it.

 

I will be presenting the same session at TechEd in Europe in a few weeks, I’m curious to see whether the same pattern will occur.

 

P.S.

I just checked the feedback on the post session “Cabana” talk (where I discussed the concepts on a whiteboarding session in front of a few architects) they are very good; which reinforces my thesis J