It's easy to paint bad managers as bad workers (or even bad people) - but sometimes, they're just bad at managing. In such cases, it's better to shift them into roles they're more suited for than to fire them and hire new people for those roles - existing employees already know the company's procedures and products. Plus, it'll likely be cheaper salary-wise - in our industry, new employees have a much better negotiating position than existing ones.
Not a guarantee, but in my experience changing the formal power dynamic can have very unexpected (both positive and negative) effects
Why are you so intent in employing them?
I worked there 11 1/2 years, and by the way was not fired. However, I saw many people fired. There were probably many more placed on a Performance Improvement Plan who subsequently quit rather than get fired.
To clarify: I mean in the rank and file software engineering. If you make legal's job hard or give the company a public black eye, that can be a short path to dismissal.
(It's a big company, so I wouldn't be surprised if, perhaps, it also varies from department to department. I have no idea if the YouTube piece and the ads piece have the same policies).
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.
An architect may have the occasional difficult meeting with other stakeholders from time to time, but their regular role is not managing people.
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.