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Ok I'll bite, what's a "software architect"?
I mean as a job description.
I've been a software engineer for over 15 years. I have a grasp of what "architecture" means in terms of a large-scale enterprise application. But a handful (not all or even most) of my jobs have had a guy I would sort of report to called a "software architect" and best I can tell he answers some occasional questions about frameworks to use, etc.
But like is that what he does all day? There seem to be long swaths of time when nobody on the dev team interacts with the guy at all. What is he doing then?
I guess what I'm asking is, is this a good grift?
My workplace (eng team is in the 5-20 people range) has someone with the title of architect - most of his job is just normal feature work (we don't have any software developers whose job isn't primarily writing / testing / deploying software), but he's also the one in charge of having and sharing a coherent vision of what abstractions our system is built out of. So for example, "we're doing domain-driven design, here are some examples of changelists that were good, here's the standard folder structure, here is the auto-formatter config so we can never think about code formatting again" style of stuff.
I don't know what the story is at larger companies though, and I've heard a lot of people speak of architects as if they don't do much, so the situation at my workplace may be atypical.
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