Honestly, it sounds like you may be geared more towards software architecture rather than software development. If you like the sound of the bigger picture more than the details, it might be something you could look into.
Is it possible to even get into software architecture without pretty significant experience? From my experience in the workplace anybody making purely architectural decisions without having to implement them is a team lead or higher in the organizational architecture.
Not sure it would happen that way out of choice, but the role can get unexpectedly thrust upon someone, experienced or not (Think startups, desperate to make ends meet with a handful of inexperienced engineers...or even at medium sized companies, remember back when Google had "20% projects"?). At startups especially though: they don't have money to go out of their way to hire an overpriced "experienced software architect"...
It goes something like: "Hey, new Engineer, I need you to work on experimental feature X". - Then the engineer builds system Y to provide feature X, probably poorly architected and not scalable, not expecting it to go anywhere. Some months later, app containing feature X gets distributed to thousands of users, or goes viral and hits millions of users.
Congratulations, like it or not, you have now become the lead architect of the now-widely-deployed "experimental" system Y, and you are going to either crash and burn or become a damn good software architect by maintaining it out of sheer necessity. Later, you find yourself putting "Lead Software Designer" on your resume, having earned that role and title.
A lot of successful software was originally designed "by mistake" and grows far, far greater than its original purpose. And in contrast, you get the well-designed software that was properly architected, but never goes anywhere because it never saw the light of a successful deployment at scale.
I think you’ve accurately described the vast, vast majority of production code that’s hasn’t been through a second wave of engineers/management and rewritten. If it works, and requirements aren’t changing, then your MVP has become the gold standard
Which makes sense right? Same reason a military general doesn’t start as a general. Architecture takes experience in the weeds to give a breadth you can leverage as you reason through architecture. Architecture isn’t aslways black and white decision making based on some specs which is where experience can help a ton.
What's your disagreement? 1st Lieutenant vs 2nd Lieutenant? Lieutenant is commonly used to refer to both.
Or are you saying that you start of at O-1 and not a higher paygrade? If that's the case, the OP was pointing out that you start off outranking enlisted service members, not that you start out above O-1.
I like roles where I get to do both! I've found that a lot of problems come from these being different roles, and the developers not really understanding or buying into the vision of the architects (who might be able to see the big picture, but can often make decisions that make no sense due to being removed from the details of the existing implementation).
Of course in really large companies I suppose having these as a seperate role is a necessary evil. But I still think there should be much more collaboration and interaction between people in these different roles than I generally see.