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.
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.
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.
Basically there's just no consistency day-to-day.