Well, it's very, very short marketing text which tries to sell "software architecture is easy and everyone wants to be an architect" which is not true. Yet it gives some basic points and I agree on all of them, however, they are true for any senior software engineer and solid team member and has almost nothing to do with software architect. It is also written from engineering perspective while there is also business perspective.

You have to sacrifice a lot, forget about perfect code, favorite tools, comfort zone, you have to operate with a limited budget, live in a real world, and every time adapt to situation and team you have or very often members/resources you don't have, your main and only job is to deliver MVP of product or feature asap no matter what it takes. Architect should understand business, speak business language very good, be a 50% tech sales person and be able to deliver notes to shareholders/top level executives, so yes, communication and presentation skills are #1 important but they are useless without the knowledge of the topics. Starting own business, selling, consulting would help to practice it.

I would also include a very important and missing point - "design" which also includes design, architecture and other patterns. Architecture is about designing and connecting, architect designs complicated system from scratch and visual tools are his main tools. You need to practice painting, diagramming, design thinking a lot, as well visualization of data, infrastructure and architecture altogether, relationship and messaging between entities.

Architect is also 50% DevOps and manager of infrastructure. You need to know answers to typical questions - like where do we get data, how SMS will be sent, what exactly would happen if production database will be damaged, how much SSD/RAM we need, how much it will cost us, etc.

Architect also is about general math, data structures and algorithms.

The hardest job of a Software Architect is to make complicated things maximum simple with resources you have to fulfill the need of the business.

In the end I, unfortunately, will disappoint you, software architects are very expensive, requires much more knowledge in a lot of domains and type of personality then you imagine, and many companies won't offer that position for you (not mentioning that every company has own definition of architect), they just don't need you or even more don't understand what is architect and why do they need one. In larger companies you will need to work as an engineer for at least year to earn a higher position.

Not everyone wants to be Architect, it's a mix of A, B, C, D, E, F. Some people fine to be Lead UI engineer, Lead DevOps, whatever, however if you like risking and very curious about many domains, are flexible and have a huge RAM in own brain, then Software Architect is definitely for you. The main difference between Software Architect and CTO is that CTO is 80% about business and CTO almost never writes code, yet, in smaller companies CTO may do everything but smaller companies really have no CTO even if you call yourself so.

P.S. be prepared that many people won't like your decisions or "orders". Still you have to practice soft skills and be able to sell any tech to your engineers as well.

Great piece. Big picture thinking and requirement analysis. Boom!

A beautiful read, thank you. A request for your next post: A road map for aspiring developers.

I think, the #1 point is the key differentiator. Clear Communication is a must for any technical architect.