Good Engineer, Excellent Engineer, Architect

I know many different engineers — many of them very good, some of them outstanding, but only a few of them have traits of good systems architects. Let me explain. Engineers' focus area is systems construction. They naturally need to become experts in answering a “how to build a system” question by defining the target system structure and performing modular synthesis. They (Engineers) were able to focus purely on excelling in systems construction because they used to have other roles like Analysts or Product Managers to cover another important aspect of the system: the functional (systems behavior) aspect, answering a “what should be built” question. And we also used to have a few Architects in this setup trying to balance function and construction aspects to make their system a good fit for its supersystem: enterprise capability, business process, or even customer “job to be done.” So Architects must juggle both in their heads, applying both engineering and analytical skills and balancing the efforts and priorities between them. This team composition of Engineers, Architects, and PMs/Analysts worked well, but unfortunately, it made our Engineers a bit narrow-focused. Most Engineers don’t really want to accept the increase in cognitive load related to mastering functional/logical architecture design. In brief, they try to resist learning these new tricks. <a href="https://medium.com/system5-dev/good-engineer-excellent-engineer-architect-ec35df2a8085">Click Here</a>