What worries me about those kind of job roles is the missing or very slow feedback loop.
As a programmer I can learn quickly and get better, because I have very quick feedback loops when I do something wrong (compiler, CI/CD, continous deployments).
As a manager, architect etc. the feedback loop is month, years - if you ever really get something back. That makes it really hard to find out if you're really doing a good job or if you're trading short-term gains for long-time losses.
I personally think, this is why we often are so unhappy about managers or architects in our field and developers often look down on them. But it's just really difficult (and often unrewarding, see article) to get good at these roles.
I was thinking the same thing earlier about teachers.
A teacher might be the greatest gift to children, or they could be below average. A school district has no way of knowing. Standardized testing can bring some level of comparison, but to isolate the teacher's contribution would involve testing students every year and tracking their test scores across all teachers they've had. A challenge most school districts don't want to volunteer for.
As a programmer I can learn quickly and get better, because I have very quick feedback loops when I do something wrong (compiler, CI/CD, continous deployments).
As a manager, architect etc. the feedback loop is month, years - if you ever really get something back. That makes it really hard to find out if you're really doing a good job or if you're trading short-term gains for long-time losses.
I personally think, this is why we often are so unhappy about managers or architects in our field and developers often look down on them. But it's just really difficult (and often unrewarding, see article) to get good at these roles.