That's why I don't work with programmers in this capacity, programming is the simple part. I work with software engineers, and the best of them probably didn't even open an IDE this week yet. I don't need them to code, I need them to tell the programmers what and how to code.
I think programmer vs software engineer is one of those semantic things that might sound witty but ultimately has little utility or shared agreement. Job listings use them interchangeably. I call myself a programmer in casual conversation because it's easier and I'd feel kind of pompous saying "software engineer", even though I'm firmly on the "software engineer" side at this point.
And it sounds a little incredulous for even a senior architect to go an entire week without opening an IDE. I'd be worried I'm working under someone out of touch, too far removed from the actualization of software. Isn't that how we got the EnterpriseBeanFactoryFactory stereotype? The best team leads and architects I know still spend a lot of their time coding. One famous example is Carmack.
> And it sounds a little incredulous for even a senior architect to go an entire week without opening an IDE.
Not really. I'm at least two levels below that and about a month ago I spent 3 days straight building a document and diagrams to convince an architect that recently joined our team that one of his plans for us was bad. (Part of the reason it took so long because I had to straighten out some thoughts and figure out how to organize years of experience that has just been building in my head over time, plus come up with alternate plans that were a better way of getting to a similar-but-not-quite-the-same end goal)
I don't remember what I was doing before and after that but it wouldn't surprise me if I hadn't touched any code for over a week.
On the flipside since then I've been deep into code, doing some re-architecting of our development stack to make it easier to work with.
It was meant to be mostly a joke, I agree it's vague and I do the same as you do. Though the point stands - very senior or principal engineers/developers/architects are not there to write code.
A team lead should be hands on, I agree. But there are also technical people who operate above teams and even above departments - those probably don't code much. Most of their time is probably spent in business/strategy meetings and writing stuff in Jira and Confluence.
A principal engineer can be on the same hierarchy/influence level as a very senior manager or director, leading hundreds of people.
