[theshrike79]

I've had calls with Principal Architects who couldn't code themselves out of a wet paper bag.

And according to the company experience chart, they should've been a "thought leader" and "able to instruct senior engineers"

My title? Backend Programmer (20 years of experience). Our unit didn't care about titles because there was a "budget" for title upgrades per business unit and guess which team grabbed all of them =)

[geodel]

Its an epidemic all over in IT departments and s/w industry in general. Nowadays people whose sum total knowledge would be managing some packaged Oracle/SAP software installation are holding title of CTO/SVP/EVP of software organization with thousands of developers.

Since they bring a certain cluelessness and ignorance as honor to whole orgs actual technical expertise among engineers could be detriment to one's jobs and career.

[rglynn]

How many civil engineers or architects know how to put up scaffolding or lay bricks?

That was a little tongue in cheek, but I am genuinely curious what you think the correct approach is? I have seen many teams that do need to have someone overseeing the overall architecture, even if that person isn't writing the code line-by-line.

If you have that capacity baked into "Backend Programmer", then great, but not every team is the same.

Is there something inherently wrong with an "architect" who hasn't written code in a decade but is instructing seniors? One might believe that the answer is self-evident, however, I would argue that the organisational structures we see in the world (functional or otherwise) do not bear this out.

[tguvot]

i am principle architect. last time i wrote code for production was more than 10 years ago. i never touched half of languages that are used in our system

in last week I resolved a few legal/regulatory problems that could have cost company tens of millions of dollars in fines/direct spend/resources and prevented few backend teams from rolling out functionality that could have negative impact on stability/security/performance. I did offer them alternative ways to implement whatever they needed and they accepted it