Hello. I have been coding for 45 years, have an impeccable resume and am the CTO of a small startup.
I've always been very big on design, even in a lot of companies that were against the whole idea. I remember once when I was given a seemingly impossible deadline, and I immediately started writing a design, management told me, "No one's reading these, you know." I said, "I am reading them!"
(I hit the deadline, even though they multiplied the number of features by 2.5 between the time I started and the time I ended, and then we were two months' late delivering because management had refused to set up any form of QA despite my near-daily pleas.)
But I still spend a plurality of my time coding. It's far faster for me to write the fundamental APIs and fill in most of the code than to get someone else to do it, and we'll get much better results.
The other programmers have more than enough to do on the application/business logic code side, and by giving them a solid, clear, easy-to-use and well-documented framework, I make it easy for them to do the right thing, and they learn by example.
(I am also the chief toolmaker, because it's something I'm good at and like, and I already have a well-stuffed toolbox.)
I have been in far too many organizations where management did no coding at all, and progress was sluggish. I remember some decades ago when I was the largest producer in a small company, and I was sitting in a room with four managers, pretty decent people, but all of them were trying to figure out ways for me to get more work out, when I was working essentially around the clock.
At some point I said, "If there were one more of me and one less of you then our problems would be solved." As I said, they were decent people, so they laughed, but it was totally true.
Don't get me wrong: I spend a lot of time on design, and a lot of time on non-coding, non-design work, usually helping out others. But I would never take a job where I didn't code, because it would be boring watching other people slowly crank out code over days that would take me a couple of hours to write.
"Not all senior programmers"!
