Architect’s Career Path

Recently while speaking at GitHub developer event, major of my audience had question on how an Architect’s career path look like. So thought sharing some my opinion here. This is just an abstract viewpoints reason being I afraid learning materials may derail your enthusiasm to be a good architect. I will try to share some of learning materials in my next blog.

In this blog, I will try to cover

  1. Types of Architects
  2. Paths into Architecture
  3. So what makes a good Architect
  4. Paths from Architecture
  5. Setting yourself apart from the rest  

Type of Architects

Our IT industry is very new and still evolving every moment. This is where our process and roles were borrowed from civil engineering world, which is very mature from decades. You can clearly see some of similarities of Roles like Software Engineer, Project Manager, Project Consultant, IT Supervisor or Program manager similar to Civil engineer, civil consultant or project manager. Software Architect is no difference then that. The roles and responsibility clearly derived from Civil Architect. Unfortunately, Software architect’s accountability is not same as Civil Architect for example, if a Building collapse the consequence is huge for the architect of the building and he/she may lose his license, where as we all know how our industry work. Our Architect just keep it as learning and move ahead.

Anyway, there are many type of architects in our industry created based on satisfying professional’s ego/satisfaction, business need and easy to sale a role aspects. In summary, here are the list of commonly used architect roles.

  • Enterprise architect.
  • Solution architect.
  • Application architect.
  • Data architect/Information architect.
  • Solution architect.
  • Security architect.
  • Cloud architect.
  • Application Architect
  • Technology Architect
  • .Net/ Java/API Architect

Paths into Architecture

There are many options available for any role to become an Architect. Your foundational knowledge and experience of your current role actually is a differentiation factor to be a good architect. Here is a representation, which may help you to choose an Architecture path.


What is Architecture?

Major of developer are in an illusion that Architecture is all about technology but ideally, it is not. Alternately, Architect is not just a smart Developer. On my opinion, Architecture of a building is not the architecture of a specific brand of a concrete or steel used in that building. Unfortunately, major of today’s architect focus on specific concrete and steel as architecture. That is where you will see certain type of architects associated with a specific product (here Ambuja cement or Mittal Steel) line like, Azure APIM Architect, Salesforce Architect Out system Architect etc...

Ideally, an Architect should possess following skills.

  1. Designing all or part of a system to meet the functional and non-functional requirements
  2. Designing the delivery approach managing risk
  3. Delivering to budget managing the customer
  4. Managing change
  5. Explaining what needs to be done
  6. Managing the development team

Transition from Developer to Architect.

Here is some of area which will help for a successful transition for a Architecture career path.


Paths from Architecture. It is true that you cannot be an architect forever
Over a period, major enterprises are realizing that, architects on leadership board are bringing a lot of value due to their clear understanding of business, thought process and awareness of human dynamics and thanks to the wave of digital transformation. Here is a map of how an Architect’s path from mid management to leadership role look like.


Here is some of area which will help us to move ahead and pick a leadership role.



Summary

My 20 years in this industry taught me that, we are the only who are responsible for managing our career. Regardless what role we are currently and what role we may choose, few basic principles which really helped me and I like to share here are,

  1. Thinking more broadly- If you are working on an API Project, then try to understand who are upstream and downstream consumer? What is the business impact? Where it hosted? Moreover, what kind of security it has?
  2. Look around you – Come out of cubicle. Speak to other architect and people. Debate/Opine and contribute to other design and architecture. This will helps to mature yourself and learning.
  3. Listen- I do not need to explain this.
  4. Prepared to move on and leave stuff behind

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