> architect stuff

how can someone be good at architect-ing stuff if they never code or code very little.

seems like the method GP is describing would be good to weed out such imposters.

I am in that condition, so personal experience here:

- i do most meetings with internal stakeholders to understand needs and changes, and document them

- i do most "architecting", as i have most context on the systems my team is responsible for (also I am the oncall escalation point all the time as I am the senior person)

- i write about 10% of the code, usually what other colleagues aren't comfortable with (legacy systems mainly these days)

"Development" is not only writing code, and senior roles tend to code far less because we get wrapped up with the rest of the company so other folks can code and deliver. My team, manager and customers seem very happy about the whole thing (but hey, maybe everyone hates me!). I do want to code more, maybe with a good PM i would be able to, but I have no illusions about that.

They've coded for 10 or 20 years, and now just sit back and design interfaces, write specs, evaluate technologies, mentor juniors, do code review, and of course the ultimate mind blow when you're trying to figure out who to fire: they remove code instead of add it. Unfortunately for the company, these "imposters" do indeed get weeded out in preference to the recent college grad copy/pasting thousands of lines of StackOverflow answers. I usually escape before all that drama though!

> they remove code instead of add it

If you can remove code from your code base without hampering the functionality, that's usually a much better time investment than writing new code.

Yes, that was OP's point.

Well then they have artifacts to prove the designs they came up with, right? Or record of their PR reviews/feedback?

If not, they are coasting and doing very little

Up to a certain stage in your life everyone in a position of power is a moron. Some people evolve past that line of thinking, some don’t.

Funny, for me it was the opposite. I used to trust the experts and assume that most people in a position of power got there on their merits.

I think for me it was more a journey of understanding the necessity of the function and not the person. As in, I would question the need for management or marketing.

As I matured and, in some cases, tried to perform those tasks myself, I had a respect for the function. The people may still suck but at least now I understand how good execution of that function is necessary for the organization as a whole.

I definitely see the value of management, marketing, and especially product management. Having worked at places with and without that function, I'm more convinced than ever that software architects are a net negative.

You can't be a good mentor or architect if you don't keep writing code each day.