I agree. Architects should just be senior coders - the people whose strategic decisions are usually right (mostly because they know how to test their assumption

I agree. Architects should just be senior coders - the people whose strategic decisions are usually right (mostly because they know how to test their assumptions). Having a specific person who doesn't do anything else but architect is broken - APIs are for programmers. If you aren't eating your own cooking you have absolutely no right to be claiming you did it well. Similarly, you could hire a developer on the strength of their testing and get them to champion a stronger infrastructure but like the architect they need to be an active developer to judge the usefulness of their solutions. I'd say managers (of coders) need to be coders too. They can survive not being if they're great managers, but they're doing it with a handicap of not being able to understand the tools and see the big-picture their team is missing. And the state of the art, not whatever they used in school twenty years ago. But, conversely I think I was a lousy employee early on (in terms of value created for the core product / hours spent) because I wasn't thinking of the business aspects of the company. So while I think everyone needs active programming skills to participate meaningfully in programming, I also think those programmers need to be aware of the business they're in, the entire industry trends, and that of the problem domain the work is in. If you design/make/sell a farming GPS, for instance, you'd better have farming experience. Perhaps the loosely overlapping networks of broadly-skilled individuals managing their own (but with input from an on the rest of the company) doesn't scale well, but I've yet to see a better idea.