[btilly]

The principles of architecting code and system design are timeless.

That I emphatically agree with. Some of my favorite programming books are decades old.

There are definitely people out there who don’t “code really well on command”, but can ask the right questions to design a solid system.

There are?

I can't say that I've ever met one.

The problem is that people don't know what they don't know. A non-programmer can know exactly the business problem to solve and exactly how they want to solve it. But they can't tell the difference between what is easy for a programmer and what is hard.

They don't have to learn a ton of programming to fill that bit in. But if they never fill it in, that limitation will keep them from being able to be a good software architect.

[tguvot]

It will be me. I am systems architect and last production code that I wrote was probably 10 years ago or so.

I am probably rather crappy programmer. I was crappy perl programmer, crappy php (starting with version 2), crappy in delphi, c, c++. Probably okay in Python, but mostly because Python allowed to concentrate on solving problem and not fighting the language.

Me been crappy was probably because I never really enjoyed to write code, as interesting part is figuring out solution to a problem. Rest is implementation details :) You can say if you want that I am simply too lazy to write code.

Me been crappy in writing code doesn't mean that i am bad in understanding code or understanding what is it to write code the easy way or the hard way.

In majority of cases when programmers come to me with design that will be easy for them to implement, turns out that they have a bunch of big problems that they missed, mostly due to lack of experience. Most of the time solutions that they come up with complicate things further and add even more problems.

And this is the point of time when I assist them to simplify whatever complex design they made to something much more simple and doable.

I saved many man/years of development time by showing programmers easy ways that they didn't know that they exists

[btilly]

Your self-assessment matches the self-assessment of other systems architects that I've seen. Suffice to say that my assessment was so different that I never again want to work at a company who have people who think that is their job. And I've seen a wide variety of programmers from a wide variety of companies agree. As a random example look up the thread for someone who had decades of bad experience with architects at Microsoft who is massively happier at Amazon (which actively avoids the architect title and mindset).

Of course I've never met you, and you may be better than the bad examples that I'm aware of directly and indirectly. But a priori I have no reason to expect your self-assessment to be more reliable than past experience.

[tguvot]

Totally understand you At my last job I was "granted" a team of architects. One of them got self-terminated after a few weeks as he was completely useless and he knew it (he got even more senior job in different company), one was okay and one required constant supervision because he was astronaut architect (he left after half an year).

Architects that know what they are doing are hard to find (my last positions were open for 6-9 months before i arrived. me hiring extra architects is similarly long process). From the other side, hiring manager/interview loop needs to have proper skill set to evaluate person and to make sure that this is what they look for (last time i got interviewed by principal architect, vp r&d, and a bunch of hands on dev leads from different departments across the company).