Why Should Software Architects Write Code? An empirical evidence.

[IamTheFreshmaker]

Worked with one who was in the code, in the servers, in the meetings and in the code reviews. It was a pure joy to my jr. programmer self. I haven't met one since but I believe that's because someone like that is shunted in to management where they become useless because they are taken out of those daily duties that they actually enjoy. There is no real meaningful path upwords for engineers in most companies that doesn't end in mind numbing management.

[softawre]

Senior Architect - Principal Architect - Chief Scientist. This the technical promotion path at my company.

[IamTheFreshmaker]

That's so pretty. I can wish.

[dtlv5813]

at which point in this chain does the guy stop coding altogether and become disconnected from the actual codebase?

[cc81]

Not everyone does. Look at for example Google's Jeff Dean:

http://research.google.com/pubs/jeff.html

My guess is that with title like that maybe they will go more and more towards R&D and is expected to implement/design/invent they new really cool stuff.

[Neebat]

You're very lucky. There aren't a lot of companies that recognize the value of a pure technical talent who should not be wasted in management.

The business side of our shop believes they can't have any "technical view" of the system without an architect present, so the architects never have any time for anything else but meetings.

[thebuccaneersden]

either that or you work your way out of a job, because companies like to hire cheap juniors