Eh, careful what you wish for. There's two extremes, and I've had the displeasure of seeing them both.
The first is those who write only code, with no regards for the overall design or documentation of the system, and are completely unable to formulate answers about the high-level functioning of the system, often ask for things based on a low-level need with no regard for what could or should happen at a high level, because nobody has the high level picture.
The other one is armchair architects who will draw system diagrams utterly disconnected from reality, with sub-systems doing things they cannot do, that we will never hire the engineering to do, etc. They'll mandate "common APIs" and "everything must be REST" (but where REST is their personal vision, which is inevitable not RESTful at all, and often is just a bespoke RPC/HTTP style API).
There's a happy medium in the middle: engineers who understand the code, can be productive in the code, but also understand and are making conscious decisions about what the highlevel should be, making design docs, emailing about intentions, etc.
Management has to offer the environment for that to flourish though: there has to be the time for documentation, the time for the design to emerge and for bugs to be worked out. But if everything is just a PM's pet ticket that is due "yesterday" and it must be done because management decrees it and once it is, repeat? Then that'll never happen, and those eng will quickly find greener pastures.
Sometimes it's really petty stuff, too. I've lost the fight of "engineering needs a mailing list to discuss technical changes, TDDs they'd like a review on, etc. There needs to be an alias for engineers to do engineering" — and yeah, no TDDs have happened since!
Yeah so just wanted to chime in here. I 100% agree. I have worked at both extremes.
My current gig is basically the first one. Nobody has the big picture. Nobody wants to discuss the big picture. They are only interested in checking off the boxes associated with the task they currently have assigned. Everything is due yesterday because there is no actual priority list and our priorities shift on a daily basis. It's utter chaos.
We are writing an ERP system. It is slowly shaping up to be a complete disaster. I have spent the last eight months trying to change this approach and attempting to lead by example.
It's not working. I will be moving on soon.
TLDR: Just because somebody can afford to hire a software engineer, doesn't mean they should hire a software engineer.
Sounds like a Business Analyst and perhaps Technical Writer. Not something the developer should usually spend most of their time doing, but a bit is good.
