okay, but code still has to be written. you can be a master architect and if the codebase requires X lines they have to come from somewhere. i'm just having a hard time grokking how you you can spend 1-10% of your time coding and actually ship anything at speed. esp if you imply you're not far away from the real engineering work.

or maybe at these companies the product is pretty stable or you're in an area where it's more optimizations vs. feature building?