Should Architects Write Code?

Ron has posted a new ARCast with Scott Guthrie about his career at Microsoft, and some general thoughts on what he thinks about Architecture.  We are going to publish this as part of our new profile series in the Architecture Journal (this will be in Issue 10, released at the end of the year).

One of the fascinating comments that Scott made was about Architects writing code:

RJ: I find that there are very few people who are purely architects in that they just design stuff and never write code. Most people
are a mix: they spend some time developing, some time architecting.
What advice do you give to people, somebody who has been doing
development but wants to do more architectural thinking?

SG: Writing code I think is valuable for an architect. Not necessarily
production code you check in, but constantly be trying new
technologies out, new approaches out and feeling how the system
works. I don’t frankly write a lot of production code these days,
really any. But I spend an hour or two every day writing code.
Whether its samples, whether its prototypes I pass on to people, or
whether it’s some fun personal project —trying things out, thinking
of ways to structure things. Being that hands-on is very valuable in a code architect perspective.

There have been many debates about whether software architects should or should not write code, and I think Scott hits the nail on the head with his reply.  I truly believe that it is super valuable for software architects to know how to write code - to be able to prototype, explore, structure ideas, or just for fun - even though they may not be checking stuff in as part of the development process.

Update: Here are some extra thoughts on the interview from Scott himself...