If your top talent spends more time debugging than designing, it’s not a talent problem; it’s a debt problem.
When architecture lacks clear boundaries, every change becomes a negotiation with chaos. Seniors are pulled into firefighting because they are the only ones who can see the entire burning building. –> This isn’t mentorship; it’s a waste.
Poor architecture creates three traps:
Cognitive drag. Without a mental model, every decision requires traversing the whole system. Juniors can’t move forward. Seniors can’t step back.
Escalation by design. When services are tightly coupled, small changes cause cascading failures. Only veterans know which wires not to cut.
Atrophy at the top. The best architects spend their days in incident channels instead of shaping what comes next.
The fix isn’t hiring more seniors. It’s building systems simple enough for juniors to own.
Good architecture multiplies force. Bad architecture drains it.
What percentage of your senior engineers’ time is spent firefighting compared to designing?