If You’re Learning This, You Won’t Be Hired as a Cloud or Enterprise Architect

If you're learning these things, you won't be hired as an enterprise architect, cloud architect, security architect, or any other architect. Watch this video to learn more. — Let me say something that'll make many people uncomfortable. If your goal is to become an architect, maybe an enterprise architect, cloud architect, a security architect, and your desire is to learn more Linux, get better at coding, uh learning how to be better at writing Terraform, or managing the CLI, or management console at AWS, Cisco, Azure, you're not preparing to be an architect. No, you're preparing to be a great engineer. And that's why so many smart, really hard working people never get their first architect job, because they're training for the wrong job. So, here's the misconception. And I see it every single week, and people come to me, they've taken 10 boot camps to become a cloud architect or a security architect. They've configured every lab, they've done everything, they've written code, they've learned so many things. But unfortunately, they lack every single architect skill, and that's what we're going to really talk about. So, when someone says, "Mike, I want to be a cloud architect, and I'm doubling down on Linux. I learned Python and Go. I'm mastering Terraform, and I'm spending hours at the AWS console. " I start to get upset. And the reason is none of these things are vet skills. But what the hiring manager are going to hire you or pay you for to be a cloud architect, enterprise architect, or security architect. And that's the key decision. So, architects are not getting paid for engineer's execution or getting the work done. That's the engineer jobs. We architects are paid for being able to either make decisions or advise executives to make decisions. So, I'm going to be very direct. If your value and skill is typing commands, writing code, clicking through cloud consoles, or deploying infrastructure, that is implementation. That is a cloud administrator's job. Now, if you want to focus at the enterprise architect level or cloud architect level, for example, we don't do any implementations in our job. We do something else. — [snorts] — So, let's break down this down carefully, because this is where people get confused. Now, a Linux engineer might be concerned in learning things like OS configuration, or Linux performance tuning, or how do they harden the operating system, manage packages, or even how do they write a shell script. That's, you know, that Linux system itself. But let's look at what we're focused on about architecture. Why the system would exist in the first place, whether we should have that system, what risk the system actually introduces, what business capabilities that the business needs will the system support, what happens when the technology fails. See, an enterprise architect, we're not focused on Linux or how to configure anything about it. We are focused about business impact, or reducing business risk, or improving the organization's cost, or enhancing revenue, for example, or enhancing business scalability, or aligning business needs with technology solutions. So, we have someone who likes to code. They're focused on learning a function, a class, an API, an algorithm, or something to that effect. They're building components. But in enterprise architecture or cloud architecture, we're focused on system boundaries, integration patterns, who owns what data, what type of a strategy, what platform strategy should we use, should we build something, should we buy it? See, an enterprise architect, a cloud architect, we don't write code, because that's someone else's job. But what we do is we decide, should we build this thing? Should we buy this thing? Uh should we have a centralized management? Should we have uh independent systems that are federated together? What are the long-term consequences of our decisions? So, while that cloud engineer, for example, would learn Terraform or infrastructure as code, and that's great for an engineer, cloud engineer, DevOps engineer, uh but, you know, at the enterprise architect level, we're focused on something different. Should a workload be cloud native, or should be uh used on legacy systems? Which workloads will be allowed in which environments? What compliance constraints do we actually have? What are the cost guardrails that we have as architects in designing our architecture? What is the reference architectures that we created, and why did we create them? So, Terraform executes decisions for those cloud engineers, but we architects make the decisions. Now, all the time, people come to me, they've taken AWS boot camps and Azure boot camps, and they've spent so much time building labs on the management console. And they got great at living at the AWS, Azure, or Google console, and they're familiar with the services and the settings and the configuration options. And again, that is great for an engineer or an admin that's focused on tool knowledge.

knowledge. But for we enterprise architects, we're not thinking in terms of vendor. We're thinking what's in the best interest of the vent the business, and how can we not be vendor be focused on a vendor, cuz vendor bias for us is a way that we could damage the business. So, we're focused again more on business capabilities and architecture patterns and trade-offs like speed versus scalability, — [gasps] — or for example, or we're focused on risk profiles, the organization's operational maturity. So, if an architect is trying to focus on engineering, like how to use the console, they're not doing the architect job in the first place. And that's the fundamental mismatch. And that's the truth that people want to hear. You could be the best Linux engineer in the world, while being a great developer and a Terraform expert, and have 50 certifications, but you may not know how to do any of the skills in the architecture job. Because architecture roles like enterprise architecture, cloud architecture, they're not about building things. They're not about configuring deploying things. Our work as architects is about business alliance alignment, strategy, governance for the business, for example, risk reduction, making decisions that'll enhance the revenue, for example, or decrease operating expenses, and really how we create an organizational impact to the organization, the organization's employees, the organization's customers, and of course the organization's business metrics. So, what we get hired for as architects is our ability to translate strategy into technology directions, to define standards and guardrails, to evaluate trade-offs. So, because executives won't have the time to evaluate some of these trade-offs, we're there to advise. We're there to reduce risk at scale and make decisions that may affect hundreds of thousands of people. So, if you want to be hired as an enterprise architect, or a cloud architect, or a security architect, stop focusing on what could you build, and start asking the questions, why does the business need this? What problem are we solving? What happens if we get it wrong? How will this scale up the organization scale financially, operationally, and organizationally? And that's the key difference between an engineer and an architect. And that's why so many great engineers never make the jump, despite being incredibly smart. Now, if you'd like to become an enterprise architect, or a security architect, or cloud architect, or an AI architect, we hold two free architecture webinars every week. We will go over what we do as an architect, the skills that you need as an architect, how to stand out as an architect, and even how to get employers to come to you as an architect, so you don't need to apply recklessly for positions. Um we host these architecture webinars live and free on Zoom, so you can ask me any questions about architecture careers you like, and I'd be happy to answer them live and free on Zoom. You can register for these free architecture webinars in the description of this video. Also, while you're video, we have so many things to help you in your architecture career, guides on becoming a cloud architect, guides on winning an architecture interview. So, maybe sign up for some, they'll be emailed to you, and they're all free. Now, if you enjoyed this video, please uh give this video a like, subscribe to our channel, and hit the bell to be notified of new videos to help you in your architecture career. And if you enjoyed this video, please spread the word to friends and others that want to become architects. This is Mike Gibbs signing off for now, and I hope to see you in another video or our free webinar real soon. —