As a software architect myself, I agree. It helps to do building. I recently took over the ownership of a small component in our system myself. That was the fi

As a software architect myself, I agree. It helps to do building. I recently took over the ownership of a small component in our system myself. That was the first time I wrote a unit test in our project. Finally I know how our testing and coverage infrastructure is configured. > The greatest architectures are the product of a single mind or, at least, of a very small, carefully structured team. In a big project, I would rather relief the one or two architects from their coding duties than to have four or more architects. While it helps to do the building, there are more important things for an architect to do. For example, I'm the one who has the overview of cross cutting concerns like logging and safety. Disclaimer: I believe there is a big difference what "software architect" means in IT/cloud/web in contrast to embedded/safety-critical/real-time. Most of the complains I hear are about the IT ones (often called solution architects). The article and also my work is in the later category. The methods are nearly the same, but regulations in the later category force the architects to focus on much more details. Maybe that helps to stay more grounded. We do have a similar acrimony with our "system architects" though.