Comment by Jach
4 years ago
There may be a sort of sweet spot in the progression where a programmer can advance to a point where they spend most of their time figuring out the code architecture (maybe with a skeleton) for others to implement the details of, with some code reviews here and there, rather than coding as much themselves (but they still code, especially the critical pieces). This lets them still be a key player as far as programming is concerned but there's also a space for more junior programmers to learn and grow without trashing the whole project in the process. The Godot engine seems to be turning into this sort of sweet spot model with its tech lead. However in a company this seems like an unstable situation, since I've seen such leads advance another step and now the only thing they "architect" is business strategy via all-day meetings, like any other executive, and the last time they coded anything was years ago. You might get them on a rare code review but they've become so far removed from the details they're not as helpful as they used to be, which in turn leads to not including them anymore. This distance hurts again because now that they have at least some influence (not as much as the 'equivalent' managerial track position, 'mysteriously') to address long-standing dev pains they are too far removed from the pain to spend their limited influence fighting it.
My own filter for how likely a company is to fall (or be) in this trap: does the CTO code at all?
>> spend most of their time figuring out the code architecture (maybe with a skeleton) for others to implement the details of
I think a good use of the experienced programmer is to write some critical components well. I'm also with you on system level design: These are the important interfaces, you write this piece and you write that one.
Another example, I have an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset. It was fantastic when I got it in March. Now they've got some glitches where the rendering STOPs for a brief instant and the view is not updated with motion. I'm wondering if this is because John Carmack is no longer full time there and someone compromised some design principle in order to implement something. Once the glitches are in, they're going to be very hard to get back out as time goes on.
Is this not what old-school corporate dev environments did? Grunts filling in interfaces? I’m sure I’ve read this sort of thing before