yes and no. the last company I worked at is a feature factory. They have senior, and staff engineers, on various product teams that have 0 technical influence. What they expected is you to somehow increase quality of the product via code review and writing design documents... but the quality of the product was being destroyed by a handful of people making all of the technical and architectural decisions and forcing their platform on the rest of the org. Upper management doesn't have the technical expertise to see this and thinks this approach will lead to some sort of unified performance and scalability. Maybe it will down the road, but if I can't change out the underlying database, ORM, or web framework for something that is just _better_, I'm ultimately just working on the assembly line at the feature factory as a Sr/Staff engineer.

I think we must've worked at the same place. I took a job at a jira feature factory working on an aging, ossified code base. Literally, it was using the same tech I was using 10 years ago, almost exactly, except it was new back then.

I spent most of my time writing design documents, doing code reviews, and shepherding my relatively small changes through review. Something I could've banged out in a week would take months due to all the review and processes.