I think an architect is a technical , hands-on job, albeit a role that bridges both engineering and strategy/management. Architects should spend some time codi

I think an architect is a technical , hands-on job, albeit a role that bridges both engineering and strategy/management. Architects should spend some time coding , maybe 25% of their time. I feel without doing some coding, you're bound to : 1) lose the view from the trenches 2) liable to slip into the management-land where every complexity is under-estimated. Especially as you need to choose between vendors, APIs, and set a direction for the larger team or org, your decisions have impact. Its important for you to be in touch with hands-on engineering work, maybe at least POC work. I work at a large healthcare IT, where the architect was actually only making diagrams, and getting needed approvals from committees/gatekeepers, as its a pretty security-focused (being healthcare) environment. Basically he's 'the committee guy' or the 'pictures' guy drawing a big fat salary, but with no technical contributions, esp since his extensive-Java knowledge is not applicable in a Python-shop.