Yes and no. I think that generally I'm maybe a 5x programmer when it comes to architecture. Architecture is what I'm good at. But when I come onto a team for

Yes and no. I think that generally I'm maybe a 5x programmer when it comes to architecture. Architecture is what I'm good at. But when I come onto a team for the first time, they don't just give me the keys to the kingdom. I don't get to make large-scale architectural decisions immediately. Instead, they have me work on smaller sections of the application. And when I'm working on smaller sections, the attributes that make me good at architecture work against me. I generally work slowly, taking a step back to understand the problem from the user's perspective, and modeling that understanding in code rather than writing code that short-sightedly solves only the problem at hand. That works well for architecture, but in smaller sections it just appears slow, like I'm not producing. It does have positive effects in the long term even for small sections of code, but those benefits aren't seen until long enough later that I don't really get credit for them. The result is that I don't make a good impression at first and it takes me a long time at a new job before I'm given authority to make architectural decisions. It would be easy for me to blame other people for not seeing my "genius" here but the truth is that this is only a problem I can work on--I need the flexibility to be able to demonstrate productivity early on and make a good impression, otherwise my poor self-presentation gets in the way of me contributing to the team in the most effective way possible. So I guess what I'm saying here is, you need both. It's not enough to just have elegant architecture, you also have to have quick programming skills.