yep, if your architects don't have their hands directly on the code, they're making bad decisions.
People talk about enterprise architects as these pie-in-the-sky people who shit diagrams and everything works wonderfully. In practice it's "seagull architecting", with everyone else forced to deal with the reality on the ground.
At some scale architects need to be more hands off. When that happens they need to have a _very_ strong relationship with the people on the ground or it doesn't work well. Even then I would argue they should be getting their hands dirty in terms of reading code, etc, they just may not have time for implementation duties.
People talk about enterprise architects as these pie-in-the-sky people who shit diagrams and everything works wonderfully. In practice it's "seagull architecting", with everyone else forced to deal with the reality on the ground.
At some scale architects need to be more hands off. When that happens they need to have a _very_ strong relationship with the people on the ground or it doesn't work well. Even then I would argue they should be getting their hands dirty in terms of reading code, etc, they just may not have time for implementation duties.