Standing up now on my soapbox as I am, the vast majority of problems I've come across in a couple of decades and a half-dozen different employers did not requir

Standing up now on my soapbox as I am, the vast majority of problems I've come across in a couple of decades and a half-dozen different employers did not require incredible programming skill or knowledge. When things went bad, they went bad because of lack of design, ignoring quality mechanisms (such as testing and reviews), inter-personal problems, poor planning, inadequate allowance made for training, and so on. Almost never for pure programming reasons. The ability to prevent or fix all these often comes with experience. I'm good at programming, but I can't ignore that I have the most beneficial effects on the bottom line when I'm making sure the team is functioning smoothly, when I'm helping the less-experienced understand some of the rough edges of the programming language, when I'm politely but firmly (and weeks ahead of disaster) telling the project manager that course correction is needed, when I'm requesting (and these days, winning) time and budget for training, and so on. If I was some kind of super-genius software engineer, working on truly hard problems, I'd be more valuable to the company writing code all day, but I'm simply not and the majority of companies (in my experience) are really not doing anything very special in code. I do still write code, I do hand myself the problems that I can see require thought and experience and so on [0], but the contribution I make beyond banging out code, based on years of experience and the skills I've developed beyond the purely technical - is far more valuable to the company. [0] While making sure that the less-experienced get tasks that stretch them but will not demoralise them, which is itself a tricky thing; I have to keep tabs on those, balancing their educational struggle with it against the need for it to be done and the need to keep them happy and motivated - if an insecure junior software dev has three or four car-crashes in a row, you can lose them forever.