I was working in a company, they had hired me knowing that I worked as a Tech Architect in my previous company, in the new company they did not call me a tech architect because they said they hated that name, because say tech architects do almost nothing, instead I was just a Ruby on Rails developer. Call me what ever you want, but just give my pay was my motto and I worked. In truth we all work for money, those who say they don’t, cut their salary and see how long would they last.

Now coming to names of positions in teams, there are these junior developer, developer, senior developer, tech lead, project lead, tech architect and so on. In this company where I was hired they the name tech architects and rebranded themselves as principal engineers.

Now let me tell you a a secret about the I.T industry. Why we have so many levels and positions? The reason is simple. The up you go the level, the less you code and more you talk. Software development is like a war, in war the lower ranks fight and die, where’s the upper ranks talk, thats exactly what happens in the I.T industry.

To make those talkers sound cool, before we had names like Project Lead, but that exposed stuff, there was no funky technical word in it, so it became Tech Lead, to make more techie it became Tech Architect (a position I hold in most of the companies), now people know that Tech Architect do nothing but eat Biriyani and Samosas and now they call themselves as Principal Engineers.

Basically we are close to the management, we do politics and intimidate people and draw huge salaries on others mind breaking work. I will write another blog what a tech architect must really do, but this is a blog to save the current tech architects and Principal Engineers.

What I have seen in most companies is these Tech Architects and Principal Engineers increase the complexity of the project so that their work looks more relevant. For example I am a Ruby on Rails consultant, that framework has excellent front end stuff, but these tech architect use Vue, React, and Angular (God evil does exist in this universe) and make the app look more complex so that they can talk a lot about it, have a bigger team and prove to others they can manage lot of people even though the entire project could be be done with a small team.

Another thing they do is to obey the management and lick its feet for survival, create tickets with tight deadlines and put pressure on developer’s. In most companies, these people are just hollow pipes, they convey message from client and management to developers and back.

So now the truth about Tech Architects and Principal Engineers getting revealed slowly from this blog on, what should we call next to protect our high salaries? I recommend Code Mechanics. We are the great guys who mend the stale code created by ignorant developers. How the ignorant developer get into the team despite our watch is an issue that must be hushed up.

So I have given you guys a new name to put in your resume, draw higher salaries for bit more longer by cheating the tech industry. Be grateful to me and enjoy life!