[kreelman]

Atlassian and Google require all of their dev hires to be "up to scratch" on architecture. They don't hire system architects at all, as far as I understand.

I wonder sometimes if the role of architect in a business might be about having a group/team wide senior person who

- Knows how to architect systems very well and can share that knowledge with the larger group and more junior devs - Is a kind of high level business analyst who can speak "business, stuff that makes money" and "dev, how it's done" to each of those groups effectively

Does Google/Atlassian miss out on things by not having system architects? ... Or can they achieve what's needed by having sensible team rules (so architecture gets followed) and relatively standard reusable architectures (so it's not too hard to adapt to a given business solution).

I'd be genuinely interested to know. My aspiration was to become an architect, but I now wonder if this is the right way to go.

[nugator]

I work at a Swedish state authority and we don't have architects deciding software architecture, the teams do that themselves. There's however an "architecture guild" composed of about 6-8 senior architects that happily help you out if you want to have help, suggestions or review of your current or future architecture. I think that's a nice way of having good support if you need it.