I am always wary of architects that don't code or at least aren't involved in the whole life time of the project so they have to feel the consequences of their

I am always wary of architects that don't code or at least aren't involved in the whole life time of the project so they have to feel the consequences of their designs. Our IT department is full of "architects" whose designs then get outsourced to India. Either their designs are crap that doesn't survive the first contact with reality or they are so trivial that pretty much anybody could do them. They spend a lot of time in meetings with important people though. I find it much better to empower the senior devs of different teams to duke it out among them. Maybe the process is not as clean as having some genius architect divine the perfect architecture but it reflects reality much better.