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Focustivity

The unfortunate side affect of being a senior architect


I spent my early career developing websites, and later business applications. I'd spend all day, nearly every day coding, and I loved it.

Although, never considered myself to be a good developer. The part I was good at was the design of the application. My code was organized, reusable, consistent, and worked well. I was good at deciding what needed to be built, and how.

Eventually, I became a senior developer, and eventually an architect.

The unfortunate side effect of being an architect, is I can no longer write code all day long.

I have many other responsibilities. In fact, writing code is a necessary luxury. I have to do it to keep up to date, but my real job is to provide estimates, documentation, code reviews, and direction to other developers. And the meetings, oh I love the meetings (not!).

"If a company’s most senior engineers just write code all day, the codebase will see the benefit of their skills, but the company will miss out on the things that only they can do. This kind of technical leadership needs to be part of the job description of the person doing it. It isn’t a distraction from the job: it is the job." (Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path)

It's all good. I still love my job.