Help.... we're doing it again

Help!!! We are doing the same mistake all over again.... A couple of years ago most companies didn't offer developers a good career possibility. There was a profession called developer, system developer or programmer and that's it. The companies I worked for had a maximum salary a developer could get and many colleagues reached that limit before they were 30 years old. To do a career or to make more money they had to switch career. They had to take a position as leader (with responsibility over personnel) or become project manager. Hmmm. That sounds good. They got a new administrative job because they were a really good developer. That makes sense. They got a passionate interest in writing code but now they writing word documents and attend meetings all day.

And now we’re doing the same mistake again. All good developers should become architects. Good developers (many of them with just experience of one or a couple of projects and no architecture training…) should suddenly become architects because they are good developers…. Most architects stops writing code. Why? How will they be able to be experts in developer- and technical issues and take decisions about these questions if they don’t know the technique? What architecture should we use for this project? How should we implement this? How does this work? Should we use.... Etc. The technique they once knew would be obsolete one day. You must keep up the learning. One architecture will be the best or even function for all projects. The non coding architects would be obsolete pretty soon them self. Sure you can read articles, read blog posts and attend Microsoft Live once a year to keep your knowledge up to date. But to be able to really build good IT-systems you need more and deeper knowledge then you can get from articles.

No, create possible careers opportunities for developers, senior developer, expert etc.
We need good developers and not just architects in the projects. One project I participated in had three architects and one developer (me). That was a good project team. And I have seen small projects with just one or two developers having one full time architect.