[deong]

I disagree. Before I went back to academia, I had both job titles at various times. The whole point of having someone in one of these "architect" roles is that they're supposed to be there to exercise judgment they have demonstrated to you as a company to be reliable.

If there's a disagreement that can't be resolved between the two of them, the architect is the one whose stubbornness I value more. You have managers to be diplomats. You have technical leadership to say, "they pay me more than you because they trust my judgment more than yours. I've heard your argument; I found it not compelling enough to overrule my own experience and judgment, and the decision has been made."

Ideally you have more than one such person to help surface the cases where the architect was wrong, but if you're routinely treating them as though they're no more reliable than junior developers, why are you paying them so much?

[xenophonf]

As an architect myself, I'm sure that some of the decisions I make look like bikeshedding - and maybe they are, but they're born out of a desire to make our services easier to implement and manage at scale. I do try to avoid arguments over trivia, but it's a fine line to walk. When you have a small system, the kinds of convention, indirection, and abstraction you'd see in large ones don't make a lot of sense, except when it comes time to scale out.