How can you possibly be a good architect if you're a bad manager?
Every skill of a good manager - having good working relationships and pleasant interpersonal relations, understanding conflicting needs from different teams, building trust, being able to schedule and prioritize work, etc. - is also a skill of a good architect. If you're off in a corner developing things by yourself, you're not an architect, you're an individual-contributor team of one (or if they're not getting implemented at all, you're just wasting the company's money). If you're actually designing architectures that other people will be following or implementing, you need to be able to work with people.
The balance of work is different, of course: for instance, architects will less often (but not never!) need to have difficult one-on-one conversations. I can understand someone preferring one role or the other, of course. I can't really understand how you can be a good architect, not just a mediocre one, if you're a bad manager, not just a mediocre one.
I think it’s pretty straightforward. When we’re young we often see friends, at our early jobs, who are good workers but get promoted and become mean + stop working as hard. Some people just aren’t good at managing other people but are still skilled at their trade.
I disagree. Your description of an architect sounds to me like an artifact of current workplace trends - which are to punt managerial duties and responsibilities to people as they get promoted, without giving them corresponding authority.
Architects should architect. There are some social skills requirement that come with any collaborative position within a company, but I see no reason why an architect should be expected to have managerial-level social skills, vs. senior-developer-level ones. There's nothing in the actual job of architecting software systems that requires it.
But to be explicit about my original point: managing is a completely different type of job than writing code or architecting systems. It's a whole specialty on its own. Not everyone has the necessary organizational and social skill set. It's learnable to a large degree, but that takes time. Just because someone sucks as a manager doesn't mean they're a bad employee or a bad human in general - it only means they don't have the specialized skills necessary for that particular role.
I think the difference is a good manager will be good at difficult one on one meetings with subordinates as part of their job on a regular basis. They’re good at the hard bits of soft squishy things with complex needs.
An architect may have the occasional difficult meeting with other stakeholders from time to time, but their regular role is not managing people.
Every skill of a good manager - having good working relationships and pleasant interpersonal relations, understanding conflicting needs from different teams, building trust, being able to schedule and prioritize work, etc. - is also a skill of a good architect. If you're off in a corner developing things by yourself, you're not an architect, you're an individual-contributor team of one (or if they're not getting implemented at all, you're just wasting the company's money). If you're actually designing architectures that other people will be following or implementing, you need to be able to work with people.
The balance of work is different, of course: for instance, architects will less often (but not never!) need to have difficult one-on-one conversations. I can understand someone preferring one role or the other, of course. I can't really understand how you can be a good architect, not just a mediocre one, if you're a bad manager, not just a mediocre one.