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Comment by thrownaway2424 | Hacker News Reader

Well, I can only tell you that at Google there are no "architect" positions, and people expressing a desire to hold such a position will probably not even get an on-site interview, much less actually get hired. Based on that I would say "no" because you can find senior, high-paying jobs where you code all day long every day,

Personally I find the idea of "architect" to be a bit of an industry anti-pattern. It's a person who hasn't written anything in ten years, essentially. If someone wants to write the design doc and implement the first draft and then other people become interested in contributing to the project, that's just technical leadership. But someone who wants to mostly talk about how they would have implemented something, ten years ago when they still remembered how to code, is useless.

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The architect at my company is by far the most talented programmer I know, and his position as architect is more often "programming the cross-functional, low and high level pieces that touch across multiple stacks and helping implement the first stages of large projects" than "sitting around and designing things". I have tons of respect for him and his grasp of subjects across many aspects of programming is profound.

So along with that, I resent the idea that an architect must be some neckbeard who spends his days conjecturing and drafting and doesn't contribute. I know the cool thing now is to have flat-hierarchy companies consisting entirely of coders, but then again Google is a very young. I'd bet in the next five years you'll see people moving into architecture positions much like the one I describe.

What you describe is more commonly called a technical lead or senior engineer, and a good one is worth their weight in bacon.

At a market rate of ~$4USD per pound of bacon that puts an average weight developer at the $600-800. Assuming this developer is paid that amount per day it will be about 150k - 200k USD per year. I'd say that would be an accurate amount of money for someone that is worth their weight in bacon.

Just to be clear, your argument is entirely over a word, and not about anything in reality -- right? Words are pointers to concepts. When you say "architect", you mean something different from what most people mean when they say "architect".

You resent this?

Well, that's all this entire thread is about—the word "architect."

And "neck beard", for some reason I don't grasp.

> I resent the idea that an architect must be some neckbeard who spends his days conjecturing and drafting and doesn't contribute

That does match my experience of working with an "architect." At a relatively small company (just under 100 employees.)

Maybe you are luckier (or the person doing the hiring is smarter.)

How many employees does your company have?

Looks like there are a few positions: http://www.google.com/about/jobs/search/#q=%22architect%22&#...

I See 7 job titles. A couple are hardware designers ("architect" like design a building), a couple are "solution architects" which a name for a pre-sales coach/tutor/guide role, and a couple are buzzword soup in project management that I can't figure out what the role actually is, maybe the fabled software architect being derided here.

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