He was sufficiently good at programming:

> Westbrook once touched legacy code without ending the company.

This strategy doesn't work, I did this twice and then got "promoted" to Architect so now I sit in meetings >24 hours a week.

usually "architects" are just people there to keep the communication rolling and make sure devs or teams don't work in silos all their life.

probably your communication skills were too good for management to passt up the opportunity of promoting you.

As long as it's not >24 hours a day, there is still room to grow.

They couldn't hire any replacement VB6 programmers.