He was right. But the problem is that they've gotten so rare nowadays that many people believe that they don't exist. This is because most big companies have given up on the idea of software design/architecture; you can only get 100x payoffs through good software architecture. Also universities never cared much for teaching software architecture - Though at least they did teach some conceptual tools for designing software such as UML diagrams and Object Role Modeling and ER diagrams for database design. But these are far from being the focus of modern curriculums and they barely scratch the surface.