The Solutions Architect job is NOT what you think.

one day you stumble on a day in the life video you heard the salaries are super high and the cloud industry is where it is at right now you're fed up with your current job your boss is being a pain in the ass and you're super ready for the change you search for different roles in the cloud and a certain role keeps coming up time and time again the solutions architect role it sounds great like there's barely any coding involved win and it's one of the highest paying jobs and you get to tell other people what to do rather than having to do the Dirty Work yourself sounds great where do I sign up a couple months later after studying for the solutions Architects exam spending hundreds maybe even thousands of dollars on training courses and materials it's been long nights early mornings you have sacrificed missed family events you didn't even make it to your best friend's birthday last week but it's going to be worth it right after all you're going to be a Solutions architect you're going to be making a top salary not worrying about bills flying over the world talking to clients life is gonna be good the time comes you've got your AWS Solutions architect associate certification bagged maybe even the solutions architect professional certification and now it's time to start applying to those jobs you can't wait for the money to start flowing Bring It On but then it's not the money that's flowing it's the rejections it's rejection after rejection after rejection what could possibly have gone wrong you did everything right you passed the certifications you did everything you needed to do you've applied for over a hundred different solutions architect jobs now and not a single interview what do you do now where do you go from here something had been driving me crazy about people trying to get into the cloud industry and that was the number of people that were coming to me after trying to land a job as a Solutions architect they've been preparing for months potentially spending lots of money but coming to me distraught because they were struggling now to land a job and wondering what to do next to me a Solutions architect was always the very prestigious role it was the type of role that you would get after working many years in Tech potentially going through lots of different positions and then you'd eventually become a Solutions architect so to me it felt almost unsurprising that people were struggling to learn that type of role after doing my research and speaking to many people I'm starting to see what's actually going wrong here and that's the fact that the title Solutions aren't protect or the job of a Solutions architect is evolving and changing over time now this is somewhat of a more recent Trend and that is what I think is at the root and the source of a lot of this pain and upset for people is the fact that that role itself is not particularly well defined to help us unpack today's topic I have a couple of guests the first one is GPS from the channel YouTube channel made by GPS she's also the creator of the learn to Cloud guide and has mentored and helped hundreds probably thousands of people into the cloud industry so she understands some of these problems and challenges intimately well the second person that I'll be speaking to today as well is Luca mezzalira he is an architect has been an architect in the tech industry for many years and talks a lot about architecture in fact he quite literally wrote the book on architecture as well now the last person you might also recognize is Andrew Brown his courses on YouTube have had millions of views and he is someone who seems to know Cloud certifications absolutely inside out and is a very prominent figure in the cloud education space so we've got three different people here to come and talk about about this topic of the solutions architect's role so first off I wanted to ask Andrew if he was seeing what I was seeing and that was a big influx of people coming into the cloud industry and looking to take on the solutions architect role as their first position finding that they're struggling and finding it difficult to land a job as a Solutions architect here's what Andrew had to say about that topic right I got a platform I collect data on my students they tell me whether they pass or they fail and a lot of them come back to me and say I I finished I'm applying for solution Arctic roles I can't seem to get them right that's probably similar to what you're seeing right okay so it turns out that I wasn't going completely crazy and it seems that a lot of cloud Educators were seeing the exact same thing that I was seeing people struggling to land entry-level jobs as a Solutions architect now I have a lot of thoughts about what it is that's attracting entry-level people into Solutions architect as their first role in Cloud because it's things like chasing after large salaries like six figure salaries maybe you've seen some sort of a survey of the highest paying jobs in cloud and solutions architect appears on there's also things like certifications Amazon web services have name certifications after Solutions architecture and this can lead you into thinking that getting that certification means that you are then qualified for the job not necessarily and also another big draw I think I see people coming into Solutions architecture is to avoid the idea of coding or technical work now of course there is potentially some Merit in that because architectures aren't typically super Hands-On but I think that that can be a particularly problematic Viewpoint as well I then asked Andrew as well what particular roles or areas of the cloud was he seeing as a good opportunity space for entry-level positions and if you had any data on that and this is what he had to say I have a data set but you know it's a small data set because it's just me collecting information and so you know if it's none the tens of thousands I don't know what people are going to take me seriously but talking to ctOS I say you know what do you need because I'm always trying to figure out what they need so I can go teach it and I'm part of the CTO Network and you know when we get down to it's like always Cloud Engineers that's what they're asked like that's the description they're they're describing and and if you say Solutions architect to them they think of it as what I thought of it which is like it's the cto's uh best friend to alleviate them of of technical creative exploratory work um you know they're not thinking these Juniors coming in to do that stuff or even seniors like it has to be a very specialized thing okay let's pause just for a second to address something Andrew mentioned in that last video because this was an opinion that I saw when I spoke to many different people about the solutions architect role I would go to them and ask them hey what do you think of the solutions architect as an entry-level role now I got a response from 90 to maybe 95 of the people that I spoke to that Solutions architecture is not under any circumstances an entry-level role now this was a very commonly held belief and it actually was the same belief that I had but over the course of the video I'm actually going to show you that that's not entirely correct so to check whether what I was hearing was actually truth and whether people were Landing entry level roles and how many I decided to run a poll on Twitter to have a look at how many people actually got into the solutions architect role as a beginner now I asked the question if you are or have been a Solutions architect how many years of relevant professional experience did you have before you got a job offer as a Solutions architect 177 people voted in that survey 50 of people said they had 10 plus years of experience before their first role as a Solutions architect which is kind of what I expected anyway however what was interesting to me was 23 of the people that responded to that survey actually had zero years of relevant professional experience before they landed a role as a Solutions architect now that's interesting something's clearly going on there something is enabling these individuals to land entry-level jobs without experience let's go back to what Andrew was talking about because I think he was on a bit of a role and I want to see what else he has to say well I get a lot right because I'm running I have this I have the free courses and the paid courses and so like it's a lot and for me it's like I need people to have a good outcome because they're not going to progress and want to continue on their Journey so I need to set realistic expectations and and steer them so like there's incentivization for me to know that correctly the third one and you've done this too I've done it in a different way but it's like go look at the job applications read read read read and type solution architect uh you know role and or any Cloud role and just read what they're asking for and think okay what is this because you know people don't they're ill-defined just because it says to devops listen Arctic Cloud engineer doesn't mean that's what it is you have to look at the components right but you know I think there's some disagreement of what goes in those boxes but we don't really have consensus from the community okay so now we come into a really important topic and that's the fact that the roles in the cloud industry are not standardized now that might come as a shock to many people especially to beginners coming into the industry who think that roles will be very clearly defined and they will be the same across different companies and this is not the case at all but it's seems to be particularly problematic for the solutions architect role which seems to be interpreted very differently across many different companies yeah I'm a bit confused about while I was confused about what a solution architect was because the first time I ever heard of one was when I was working for a real estate startup a few years ago before I I was really I mean I've been using Cloud for a long time but when I took it very seriously and I said this is going to be what I'm doing like educational Cloud stuff so I was working for a real estate company and they had a Solutions architect and their role was kind of like it was like okay this person has you know the power of the like the VP of engineering the CTO depends the size of the company right but they're not um burdened with uh organizing the team and stuff they're off doing creative things trying to find Solutions and then deliver it to their team and say hey can you go out and build this so it was kind of like a way of alleviating the VP of engineering or CTO role and the thing was you know I was a CTO before that before I was doing that uh that real estate startup I had been a startup multiple times I've heard of many different roles and I really just didn't hear solution architect much and so it was an upcoming term but you know as I understood it didn't have to anything to do with Cloud it just had to do with you know it could be business could be Tech um it was just intersections of architecting solving exploration uh that kind of stuff now the role that Andrew defines here sounds very much like what I was mentioning 90 to 95 of people thought of when I was mentioning Solutions Architects before and that it is not an entry-level position now what Andrew is about to break down here in just a second is a new emerging trend of a more customer facing more almost sales oriented to solution architect than your traditional sort of classic Solutions architect that I think many people in the tech industry are used to and so then the next version of shark attack I heard was when I was interacting with Cloud firms you know their solution architect was different it was like okay it was like a sales role where they're saying well we go out and we our goal is to convince people to buy into our Solutions so we can Implement them and then they had a variant of that which was like their junior solution architect I don't know if they distinguished a senior or Junior but there was solution architect on the field and there was solution architect doing the implementation um uh the architect of that thing and then you know getting into uh Cloud certifications eight of us had the solution architect and so I went back to that role that uh that started I said oh I'd love to be like a you know a CTO that's not tied down and having fun and so I thought that's what it was but in a buses solution architect is something else um and so you have all these different variants of it and it's confusing so I really like the way that Andrew actually breaks this down he talks about sort of a field solution architect and more of an implementation Solutions architect now of course there are many ways of breaking down any role and we could categorize them in different ways but these are two broad categories that I think are very useful now when you talk about field what we're talking about is a sales term it's someone that's out in the field talking to customers Bridging the Gap between a company and potential future customers now that type of solutions architect might be you know let's say working for one of the cloud providers and trying to marry up the architecture of a customer to the services that that cloud provider provides and then on the other side we have a more sort of implementation Solutions architect one that is actually working within a company working with teams and getting into the fine details of that specific company and that's what I think a lot of people think of when they think of an architect is that more implementation oriented Solutions architect now you might be open to both of these interpretations of the role or it might be one of those was the one that you had more in mind however I don't see many people talking about these two categories in fact GPS has a funny story about this exact scenario because she talks about how she was considering the solutions architect as a role for her own career but she was thinking more about this sort of implementation type of solutions architect rather than this sort of field more sales or customer oriented Solutions Architects let's go and have a listen to that story and you'll see what I mean like for me an architect was always someone with years of experience because you were creating the blueprints and you would tell like you would know which services to put together and that can only come if you've been through it for a couple of projects if you've done it played a couple of other roles in other projects and you fully understand and to me also this pre-sales thing was new to me and it only came up because I remember tweeting I remember tweeting hey I think solution architect is the next role I want to do after advocacy and I had a couple of colleagues in Microsoft hit me up on teams and they were like you might want to rethink this because this and then they introduced me to this and this was this year man this was this was like a couple of months ago I can't maybe like two three months ago they were like you know solution Architects like the majority of them now it's like very like sales heavy there's quotas all those kinds of things like I know you I know you you're more so and focus on like the engineering and the implementation aspect you might want to reconsider and I was like I did not know that I thought an architect was you know implementing so so really you shouldn't feel bad here this caught me off guard and it clearly caught Gwyneth of God as well the fact that Solutions architect is interpreted in different ways and there are so many different flavors of what a Solutions architect actually does the important thing that you need to take away and realize here though is when it comes to targeting Solutions architect as a role for your career or as a job that you want to apply for is that you really need to look into what that specific company is defining as the solutions architect role and what are the specific skills and background that that company is looking for and not just thinking that Solutions architect itself is a generic skill set because it absolutely is not it's very different interpretations across different companies parts of the industry and certainly in different parts of the world at Microsoft we have solution architects that are more of what I feel like people consider the entry level ones like very like pre-sales focused sales pre-sales and they don't do any implementation and there's also solution Architects that are dedicated to work with with clients actually implementing which I think in other companies they call them like Cloud Architects or different names so even within like a company itself there's a lot of confusion now I know a lot of people won't just be getting certifications in Amazon web services for instance but they will also naturally gravitate towards Amazon as an employer and be looking to apply at AWS as a role as a Solutions architect now I think it's probably about time that we bring in Luca who actually works for AWS as an architect who can break this down a little bit more for us and what he's going to explain is the differences when working for let's say a cloud provider as a Solutions architect working closely with customers versus a Solutions architect that works let's say in a product or more traditional company where they're working more internally rather than with external customers and how that affects the different demands on the role and the different skills that you need to have and how you need to be thinking about Gathering those skills to be honest uh I think you know you can find a variety of people in in the with the title I'm personally not Reliant much on that uh for me title is just let's say something that you need to have but I I think it's more interesting the behaviors of the people and what they're doing I I believe uh that you know when you start your career straight into architecture you need also to understand what kind of architecture you are um because if you think about working on a product and being an architect is completely different from working in AWS and being an architect uh because the the way how I see is that very often uh yes you might have the title but you're not acting as an architect the role is completely different from uh how I Was An Architect in my previous jobs in different organizations uh mainly because um we are not part of uh every single context right so you are not in the or every single room that matters that you will understand the hand-to-end thing what we can help is trying to do our best on understanding the customer understanding what what they are doing what they're trying to achieve asking questions for for Gathering the the context but we're not leaving day to day with the customer and that's the thing depending on how the company sees the solutions architect role will affect how you should approach your job hunt towards it it's important to really understand that those different categories exist because when you're Googling or on YouTube or looking for different content or insights into the solutions architect's role is that people might not necessarily be making this distinction but it's vitally important that you do and you understand which type of role you're actually applying for and what skills you'll need for that role so is the solutions architect a beginner role sure there are certainly companies out there that are hiring for people into Solutions architect title roles that are coming in with very little or even no experience however those are typically larger companies that have the training budget to bring those people on and those might also be in these more customer facing roles so if you're looking at potentially being more of a builder type something like what GPS mentioned earlier on it might make more sense for you to start in a more individual contributor role like Cloud engineer or soft for engineer something like that and then potentially look at making a move into Solutions Architects slightly later in your career something that I'm always mentioning to people is the fact that your career does not have to start with the same job as your dream job that you might want to have in a few years time so it's up to you you could Target Solutions architect now if that makes sense for you or you could leave that as a general aspiration for your career that might materialize in let's say five or ten years however just one word of caution though is I would say if you're coming into the industry with little or almost no experience I would advise you to try and stay away from applying for a Solutions architect roles where it's clearly that they're looking for someone with a deep level of experience and they're looking for someone who has came up through the Builder out and looking for someone who can be potentially a little bit more Hands-On with their team because ultimately if you don't have that experience you're going to really struggle in that area however there is one caveat there now I do see people being successful jumping into Solutions architect roles if they come from a professional background let's say you've worked in Consulting Finance something similar to this where you're working a lot with stakeholders you're communicating a lot well then you're going to have quite a lot of crossover to the solutions architect role and that professional experience could count for something if you're able then to go out build your Tech skills as well to complement that now I'm constantly mentioning to people that they should focus on a job title however I must say that advice falls apart a little bit when it comes to the solutions architect just because I have how widely interpreted this role is in the cloud so what I would say specifically for Solutions architect role is yes tailor your job hunt to the title of solutions architect but also make sure you tailor your job hunt towards company specific versions of solutions Architects what that means is going to the careers pages of specific companies looking into job descriptions for those companies go look at the job applications read read read read what they're asking for and think okay what is this speaking to people that have also worked for those companies as well and I would largely say that sitting on social media doesn't really count or isn't going to be sufficient research for you to really understand what's needed for that role in this specific company I would really implore you to get the laptop out and start doing some browsing on the internet start to build up some notes and start to build up a clearer picture of what a Solutions architect looks like in the companies that you want to apply for if you enjoyed this video and you like this type of career content I can definitely recommend a video I made quite recently where I break down the skills that are required for a bunch of different jobs in the cloud industry by looking at over 2 000 job descriptions I automated a bot to scrape all that data and then analyze the results that might be useful to you if you're at the point of trying to figure out which job is the right job for you in the cloud industry I will be putting out lots more videos about careers in the cloud industry over the coming weeks and months so be sure to subscribe if you want to stick around for more content my name is Lou this is open up the cloud and I look forward to sharing your I got the job post on social media sometime soon see you in the next video

Channel: Open Up The Cloud

Views: 40,650

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Id: --ny4JC6veA

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 03 2023