[yokaze]

I think, you are misreading it.

It isn't about making an architectural design decision / change at 3am, but someone has to live with the consequences of such a design decision and fix something in some way or another at 3am in the morning.

I.e. you could go with a clustered db setup which is supposedly HA, or a classical single instance DB...

The point here is, whoever has to get up at 3am to fix a potential catastrophic failure in the setup should have a say in it.

[tgv]

If the architect is also the coder/support, then it's a moot point. But if there is a separate architect, or a pack of them, there's no point in waking them up at 3am. Any architectural change isn't going to be deployed within the hour.

Personally, I think the designers/architects should work on the code too. You have to dogfood your own design, so to speak.