What do your Solutions Architects do?
Posted by Suspicious-Fuel-3414@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 26 comments
I come from a well established brick and mortar business and so we aren’t really a “tech” company. I am wondering what others have seen in this setting in terms of Solutions Architects. What did yours do? What didn’t they do?
Looking for what others have seen to hopefully take inspiration from and influence the future of my orgs definition of roles.
csguydn@reddit
Principal Solutions Architect here.
There’s already some good answers, but I’ll tack on most of what I do.
A good portion of my time is spent building PoC’s for the near future of the projects that I’m on. For instance, I’m currently building a service mesh to allow all of our Microservices to talk to each other.
Quite a bit of time is spent with the immediate engineering team, offering guidance and solutions where necessary. I do review code. I don’t pick up engineering tasks. I do attend standup. My updates are typically on items that might impact the team from other verticals and/or lanes. I do help the team grow in the areas of best practice or through observations I might see on their work.
I also work across multiple verticals, from Analytics to Data Science to Integrations and beyond. Essentially, I act as a sounding board for solutions that these teams are implementing and/or I help solution if they need guidance. It helps to build good rapport across all of these teams, and a good bit of the job also involves “soft” skills, as you’re often talking to people all across the organization and not just engineers.
Beyond that, I serve as an expert in the cloud, distributed systems architecture, and a few other topics. I also work to set engineering standards in the organization. Finally, I document and write quite a bit as our architecture is organic, and a lot of things need to be explained both up and down at different levels.
newuserevery2weeks@reddit
1 year later, still do all this?
csguydn@reddit
Different org now, same role. And yes, it’s very similar.
newuserevery2weeks@reddit
Ever miss doing the full SDLC?
csguydn@reddit
Absolutely not. I lived that life for many years. I have no interest in going back.
newuserevery2weeks@reddit
Haha the definite answer makes me curious. Why not?
csguydn@reddit
Because writing code and working on tickets is boring. I did it for years. It doesn’t motivate or excite me in any way.
poi88@reddit
and what about your role nowadays? what is the typical progression path for a solutions architect? just curious as you answered the guy 3 years ago.
Opposite_Custard_214@reddit
A typical progression for a solutions architect is atypical. I've done both side of the fence and am currently mulling an SA position. There's pros and cons to both.
The biggest con you'll see as an SA is that there are a lot less SAs than engineers in the field.
The biggest pro I find is for the same reason. I've yet to see a college grad come out as a Solutions Architect. I'm sure they are out there, but a lot of the skills needed to be an SA is from working in the field for years.
My background is heavy engineering though. So I can see SA work, at the moment still, from business needs and complexity to implement. I've yet to transition to just reading white papers and looking at cost charts to determine theoretical application.
How's the new role going from your standpoint?
poi88@reddit
Thanks for taking the time to answer!. Lots of good info. From my side, I can tell you what I've noticed so far is that my new company actually wanted a software architect disguised as solutions architect. Let's see how it evolves in the future, but for now it seems that way. I also liked it, however it has cost me as I was a little out of touch with .net and aspire and in general with development down to the code, but I'm in a much happier position, so that makes for it.
Opposite_Custard_214@reddit
.net has definitely made a big comeback in how many companies want an engineer skilled in that language. I never touched C# till about 3 years ago. Luckily, its not that hard of a language and made Java (another one I didn't have any experience with) a lot easier to read.
I can concur with you on SA being more used as a Solutions and Software/Application architect. The only reasons I feel I'm even in the running for some of the SA opportunities thrown to me is because of the modernization needs and polyglot ability.
Outside of large enterprise and agency work I don't think I've ever seen a true Solutions Architect.
hearmeoutpls1@reddit
Finding myself transition into this role for a big insurer in healthcare. The plain seems complex not in terms of tech but rather fragmentation. Any advice? I feel l may be regretting this transition and might want to go back to IC
DaRadioman@reddit
Solutions Architect => customer facing often sales oriented role. Otherwise similar to other architecture roles Software Architect => (Me) Software focused, senior+ tier role. Designs overall technical product approaches for internal, helps others understand the existing system, assists with thorny issues, and concerns like scale/security/etc Enterprise Architect => more rare senior++ role. Often focuses on strategy and targets. Usually not close to code at all, and some get criticism for this if not careful. More of a theory and vision role. Usually works with Software Architects to actually roll out the designs at a practical level.
And all of that varies greatly by company. Some use those titles and none of the alignment.
Big-Comparison2029@reddit
What tools do you to design
krubner@reddit
I'd put it like this:
There is a widespread belief that programmers should go into management once they get into their 30s. That is, if they are any good, they eventually get promoted into management. A few companies pay senior engineers very well, but most companies pay managers better, so it becomes rational for computer programmers to give up computer programming and go into management.
However, there is also a widespread belief that once a computer programmer goes into management, they only really understand the tech for the first 5 years they are in management. Once they've been in management for 10 years, they really don't understand technology any better than some random MBA who never worked in tech.
So the question comes up, is there a way to make use of the most talented, senior level engineers, something more than having them grind out code, but something that doesn't involve the day to day management responsibilities that might take them away from the tech?
It's to answer the last problem that various titles start getting invented that have "architect" in the title. It's a person who does not directly manage other people, but they are not grinding out code, either. They are at a high level, using their experience to figure out an architecture that will help the whole company.
Needless to say, such roles only make sense at large organizations.
You can sort of get some sense of this from what I wrote here:
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/why-are-large-companies-so-difficult-to-rescue-regarding-bad-internal-technology
But keep in mind, an architect is only useful if they have real power to decide the features that will be offered, and the system that will support those features. They must have the power to say "no" to ideas which they feel will be too expensive. When an architect doesn't have any power, they tend to just brainstorm interesting ideas, which actually slows projects and make them more expensive. The most expensive software failure ever ($3.7 billion dollars) had a lot of software architects who were powerless to control the project, see details here:
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-worst-software-project-failure-ever
engineered_academic@reddit
This attitude needs to die.
39, and still going strong. I've taken on additional development responsibilities and am clearing 400k total comp this year. Why would I ever go into management?
The prevailing attitude of programmers in their 30s getting aged out is because 30 years ago computers weren't as prevalent as they are today. My generation has grown up with tech, and the internet, and I daresay understand the fundamentals of computation better than the newer generation who have grown up on iphone and ipad.
Being a programmer after 30 is entirely a choice: It takes time and mental effort to stay on top of new and emerging technologies and exist in on-call rotations, especially with a family. I've met plenty of of people who tapped out once they had a family because they stopped grinding. Going the management route is just easier because people still need to get paid.
Experienced developers also get wiser to working extreme schedules and don't put up with crunchtime hours and stupid decisions. If you want to do on-call rotations, there's no need for off-hours on call in the modern 24x7 society. "Failure to plan is not my emergency" is a common saying I have.
So the combination of increased responsibilities outside work and the desire to not be taken advantage of means that places developers over 30 can go will shift to environments that aren't startups. This skews the experience of younger, more inexperienced developers to think that "developers over 30 go to management."
Also, I don't need to interview LeetCode questions to get a job. In my latest round of interviews, I only had to do one LeetCode test, and it was a trivial task. The others were "technical" but non-coding discussions about the domain I specialize in. My experience speaks for itself on my resume, why do I need to take a bullshit coding exercise? Look at my github if you want to see I can code. I refuse, and I landed 4-5 offers.
ledaloop@reddit
Wow! Thanks for vocalizing this.
engineered_academic@reddit
There needs to be a reddit sub for old comments that you forgot you wrote.
crimsonslaya@reddit
What grueling hours or on call rotation are you talking about? Literally every dev I know works 9-5 and that's it. lmao It's a comfy job. Btw, you do realize a 30 year old is considered a young dev right?
engineered_academic@reddit
This post is 2 years old now, damn.
engineered_academic@reddit
Times have changed in 2 years. Market was hot, now it's...not.
InnovativeGam3r@reddit
Lol I read this with the current market and was thinking about how I missed the old market. It's been TOUGH lately. I've gotten used to completing hours of take homes only to get rejected after 2 months of interviewing
Reverent@reddit
Solutions architect for cyber infrastructure here.
Half my job is making sure that the right technologies get chosen for a project (and putting together/arguing papers that explain that).
The other half is helping project managers navigate office bureaucracy (ie: explaining that the endorsed tech solution is the way we're doing it, over and over, I don't care if you did it this other way one time Carl).
If I'm feeling snarky, the other way I put it is I get paid to be opinionated.
Solutions architect is really a function of companies getting too large. They serve a role, but in smaller companies a SRE or senior developer or IT director would be making the same decisions with far less overhead.
Suspicious-Fuel-3414@reddit (OP)
Thanks for the response, I appreciate the insight. Could you go into more detail about making sure the right technologies are chosen for projects? Any reference material you can recommend on how you accomplish this?
Reverent@reddit
If you want the bureaucratic answer, it's about choosing solutions that rely on established technological patterns and minimize tech debt and bleearargh I threw up in my mouth a bit.
In reality its about understanding several truths about technology.
Aside from that, research research research. It's something I enjoy and do in my spare time, which is probably how I got the job to begin with. Browsing the right forums (like this one, albeit this subreddit is 90% career related these days) helps.
Also, testing testing testing. Most architects live on whitepapers and theory. I like to get my hands dirty, and I often give live demos to other departments about technologies they should consider. I think that puts me in the minority, but I like to think that it turns me from a good architect into a great one.
josefiswoke@reddit
The "threw up in my mouth" bit made me spit up my coffee. Thanks!