I wasn't convinced of the gp commenter's sentiment about you being a less-than-ideal boss to work with but it seems you proved his/her point.
Not sure whether you actually understand the issue raised by him/her -- the process of defining, designing and architecting a solution is very much something that an junior engineer would aspire to be able to take responsibility for one day. But under your working model, only one person (you) would be mainly responsible for doing that, and other people could only prove their worth by doing their piecemeal work (the small and isolated "projects") faster.
Not saying that this is actually true, and from your original comment it seems that it might not be completely true, but that's what the the gp commenter wanted to say. And you seem to confirm it in this comment -- you praise people who work fast but haven't seen you mention about their code quality or "taste" in architecture or design.
... and I haven't mentioned the retaliatory vitriol. Seriously, talk about jumping to conclusions...
Personally, I would wonder how you assess "delivered value", given that this is basically one of the hardest problems to solve involving questions about asthetics, ethics, business management, leadership, capitalism and even the worth of a person's time... but I'd jump to my own conclusions and will assume you think you have figured it all out :)
When you code all the time for over a decade, you know what good code looks like. When you care about the product, you know what a well implemented feature looks like from the user's perspective. So it's easy to approximate value from these two aspects.
The people who work with me learn a lot about architecture because I explain everything. I only had 1 manager who had a similar style as me in my own career as a developer (out of over a dozen) and I wish I would have had more of them or that I could have worked for them longer.
You're assuming things because you've probably never seen a good manager in your life. It's difficult to imagine something better than the best you've known.
To put it more concretely, how many people have you been able to promote into a role like yours where they are defining the architecture, in the last 5 years?
For simpler projects (like simple front end applications), I usually let developers decide the architecture themselves (I mostly just offer advice).
Since in those cases, architecture is not as critical.
I was myself overlooked for promotions for over 5 years (in spite of constantly asking for one).
I was better qualified than my managers to be making architectural decisions but they only realized this after I left (since I started a competing project).
So I know how it feels to not be given the chance. I even know what it feels like to have an incompetent person promoted as my boss.
That said, it doesn't make sense to put someone 100% in charge of architecture if they don't yet have the necessary skills.
Some systems are extremely complex and easy to mess up architecturally so I wouldn't hand off this responsibility unless I knew that the next person would do it properly.
Not sure whether you actually understand the issue raised by him/her -- the process of defining, designing and architecting a solution is very much something that an junior engineer would aspire to be able to take responsibility for one day. But under your working model, only one person (you) would be mainly responsible for doing that, and other people could only prove their worth by doing their piecemeal work (the small and isolated "projects") faster.
Not saying that this is actually true, and from your original comment it seems that it might not be completely true, but that's what the the gp commenter wanted to say. And you seem to confirm it in this comment -- you praise people who work fast but haven't seen you mention about their code quality or "taste" in architecture or design.
... and I haven't mentioned the retaliatory vitriol. Seriously, talk about jumping to conclusions...
Personally, I would wonder how you assess "delivered value", given that this is basically one of the hardest problems to solve involving questions about asthetics, ethics, business management, leadership, capitalism and even the worth of a person's time... but I'd jump to my own conclusions and will assume you think you have figured it all out :)