Ehhhh, depends on how your titles work, and I would argue that's at least a little odd. Most senior engineers I know are ~50/50 code/oversight, at worst. Once you get to Principal or Staff, though, you're lucky if you write 50 loc/week.

Senior rarely translates to something like architect anymore, it's at least a level or two up from there.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The beauty of titles like this is that they're absolutely meaningless.

You can't compare them between companies, sometimes even departments, you can't compare them between different industries, and you can't compare them between countries.

I'm a senior, and my job is currently to sit in meetings most of the day to convince BAs, architects and other team's leads not to make stupid decisions. The rest of my time I'm communicating the results back to my colleagues and writing escalation mails, because Steve again tried to re-introduce his god awful ideas that we shot down five times before and I'm hereby voicing my concerns in a business-like tone, but actually would want to exterminate him and his entire offspring.

My old project, however, was completely different and I actually spent 70% of my time actually writing code and 20% code-related meetings.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like you're doing the job of a PM to me, but I guess that's just confirming your point that titles aren't comparable

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Not really, it's really largely a technical discussion, but we have a distributed monolith (the architect calls it micro service...) so each change of an interface will percolate through the entire system.