Yes, for many companies it's a critical part of the career path for programmers who don't want to be managers.
So all the good programmers (or programmers that stick around long enough) become architects. The system actively weeds out people with lots of domain knowledge and an ability to solve problems by promoting them into architects.
Theoretically architects should be helping teams write even better code than they did before, but usually the teams ignore what the architects do, so there's a whole "us versus them" thing going on.
Not all architects have a programming background. Eg. in Lucent, the architects where postdocs and PhD's in wireless technologies and related fields. I think even Google has postdocs as architects.
So all the good programmers (or programmers that stick around long enough) become architects. The system actively weeds out people with lots of domain knowledge and an ability to solve problems by promoting them into architects.
Theoretically architects should be helping teams write even better code than they did before, but usually the teams ignore what the architects do, so there's a whole "us versus them" thing going on.