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Context is key here, but as a thought experiment- the most profitable businesses can hire with effectively no limit if they choose. FAANG isn't a great proxy for that but it'll do - assume their hiring bar is "can produce excellent code". Then what? Do you just allow everyone to heads down code? Principals and staff engineers rarely contribute directly to features because in their org context, with their expected level of staff - code is cheap and easy. Orchestrating decision making is very hard, and aligning technical to product outcomes is hard. How often are these businesses with huge budgets routinely criticised for poor releases? Yet their overall value remains enormous, because their cores are money printers.

Being an expert in the domain of writing code is relatively easy. Being a domain expert of your businesses value and the tradeoffs its making is very difficult. Just because people like the writing code part of the job doesn't make it the end game for the most valuable skillset.



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