We have SW Architects. Here is what I've seen: John Smith is a great engineer. He does absolutely amazing work and is able to move up the company ladder. He in

We have SW Architects. Here is what I've seen: John Smith is a great engineer. He does absolutely amazing work and is able to move up the company ladder. He interacts with many teams, has a lot of influence and so has great impact in the company. Eventually he gets promoted to the Architecture team. Once he reaches there, he can 100% focus on putting his great experience to maximize his influence and solve high-level problems. He even has regular 1:1 meetings with some powerful VPs. The problem is: since John is now part of the Architecture team, he is not really involved in the front line anymore. There's a chance he doesn't even get to write code anymore, all he does is tell people what and how to code, and sometimes he reviews patches. He has that code assignment that he has been trying to finish for a long time, but the higher-priority Architecture Team work is preventing him from putting that time in. He'll probably have to delegate it to the new employee James Jones. Over the course of the next few years John Smith starts getting more and more out of touch with reality. His ideas start making less sense, some of his suggestions simply don't work because of how we reworked the entire locking infrastructure last year. He doesn't know how to interact with new CI system so he gets misses some important things. John was recently asked to do a tech review on a certain new feature, but he's not up-to-date with the code since that new mega-feature so he put James Jones to do the actual review for him. All our devs are criticizing John Smith for only having impossible or obsolete ideas, being a stupid proxy architect that does nothing useful to the company. How the hell can he get away with such a huge salary, given he's so incompetent? Did he have to do sexual favors to someone to reach that position? But James Jones is such a great engineer, we should put him on the Architecture track since I'm sure he will be able to fulfill some of the gaps we have there! Unfortunately there are too many architects already, so we're going to have to wait someone to retire or quit, since no architects ever get fired, all the VPs love them.