[cryptica]

If you have to work on a very complex project, you need to plan the architecture at a high level or else it will be a disaster. I've seen the code-as-you-go approach fail miserably over and over.

Try coding a decentralized P2P system where multiple instances of the same code running on many different kinds of machines communicates with itself in a scalable and DoS-resistant way. There is no way anyone can implement this properly without careful architecture planning. You would never get it right the first time unless you plan and analyze all the main use cases carefully.

Or try to design a distributed pub/sub system or message queue with automatic sharding across the cluster. Also needs a lot of planning. You can't just code along and hope to get it right.

[daxfohl]

Yep, I agree completely. I'm just saying that in my experience, the person who leads that planning also does a whole lot of the implementation. I've been around the business 20 years from startups to enterprise to FAANG, from embedded life support devices to dev tooling to cloud services, and I can't recall an instance where there was a dedicated "architect" role that didn't dig pretty heavily into the codebase as well.