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I agree, architecture departments are anti-patterns, but very soon, IC cannot grow in the value they can bring to a company by being scoped within a team and shipping code - as IC you scale by: writing some code that benefits many teams, by mentoring, helping with planning and executing challenging work, prototyping, organizing and overlooking large engineering initiatives: CI/CD, ops, migrations on a large scale, and more and more.

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Yeah, you are right. Where I've seen it work is when an embedded IC is given free reign to spend time helping other teams organically. The real root cause for architecture in abstraction is a management issue where some VP is kingdom building by collecting engineers to be disconnected oversight architects to other engineering groups.

I feel like one of the worst things that can be done to engineers is disconnecting them from the problems being solved.

> embedded IC is given free reign to spend time helping other teams organically

Then, by definition, they wouldn’t be an “embedded” engineer, no? In fact, what you’ve described is not at odds with what I’ve described.

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