Developer or Solution Architect?

How do you know if it's a good idea for you to move over from being a developer to becoming a Solution Architect?

Do you:

• Find yourself interested in the infrastructure side of things?
• Find excuses to get involved with the DevOps side of things
• Find yourself interested in why what you are doing is important to the business
• Like to keep up-to-date on what’s coming up on the technical and business landscape to know whether what you are doing actually makes sense right now
• Find yourself 'stepping up' and helping to give direction when you see it's needed - even if it makes you feel uncomfortable to do so
• Find that the development doesn’t seem to be quite enough because of your insatiable curiosity to find out Why? over and above the pure mechanics of it

That’s a pretty good indicator that you should be looking into becoming an architect.

However, it does depend on where you prefer your focus to be.

If you are essentially a really good developer, and you enjoy working primarily with other developers, but you want to be stretched further and learn more, then you could simply switch technologies and learn something else and expand your knowledge of development within a different domain.

In reality, developers are also Solution Architects (in that they think up solutions to things), but on more of a micro scale.

That’s why I don’t typically create a solution for something in more detail than is necessary - and that requires some knowledge of a developer’s capability. But then, a good technical lead can also do this.

Where it changes is that as a Solution Architect, you tend not to be able to get into the detail as much as you could when you were developing every day. Some manage to keep their hand in, or find a role in a smaller company where this is needed. But then, you are being more of a jack-of-all-trades than specifically a Solution Architect.

This is one reason why many people change jobs more frequently these days. They try new roles on for size, see if something looks like it is a good fit, grow, and then move on when they need to stretch themselves a little further.

Others don’t. They like what they do, and they don’t really want to stretch themselves perpetually beyond what interests them in their immediate work. That’s okay, and valuable for a company.

Where do you think you fit on that continuum?

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any other thoughts on how you can tell it's the right time to make that change to becoming a Solution Architect...

Originally appeared as a Quora answer and post on Solution Architect Central web site