Many people in our industry never get to do much architecting beyond a very limited scale. Much of my career was spent fixing bugs as a contractor or implementing very targeted features in embedded systems. It was only later on in my career where the balance shifted to more architecting of larger features.
Plenty of folks are just 'programmers'. They're barely software 'engineers' and definitely not computer scientists. It is perfectly reasonable to spend your entire career as a programmer, dealing with small issues in a systems you inherited from someone else.
Plenty of folks are just 'programmers'. They're barely software 'engineers' and definitely not computer scientists. It is perfectly reasonable to spend your entire career as a programmer, dealing with small issues in a systems you inherited from someone else.