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Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, Solutions Architects are on the services side, while Architect (no modifier) are on the engineering side. Solutions Architects put together customer specific solutions from a suite of technologies, while Architects are responsible for the general development and maintenance of said technologies. Solutions Architects may also work directly for the company that build the technology, or as partner who offers services and expertise.

They are completely different roles with different tracts.

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This is my experience as well. A solutions architect is likely to be working directly with customers to achieve what they want with the product which can involve deployment work, integration work, etc. Sometimes this work is found to be repeatable across customers and may be engineered into the product. An architect (in a software or IT context) can have pretty widely varying responsibilities, usually more focused on building product or internal company environments. But solution architects have been fairly consistent in scope of responsibility across the companies I’ve been exposed to

Agreed.

And, fwiw, I know several people who work on the services side and it seems like a never ending deluge of tight deadlines and one-off work that doesn't add up to deep expertise like an engineering role would. It's like sprinting a slightly different race month after month: you work hard but never learn the course or how to run it better next time.

Would be interested to hear if any solutions engineers have a different perspective.

No, I'd agree with this. Your AEs / clients always want it done as fast and cheap as possible. I enjoy the variety of problems and clients, and honestly sometimes find working with our SWEs a bit pedantic. I have a Get Shit Done attitude.

I would say, the top maybe 5% of Sales Engineers/SAs (whatever you call them) do have a very deep expertise in one area and those are the folks who are trusted to get a deal done. I've done defense tech, adtech, and now databases. I've been the time to really go deep on databases and that's what I'm building my career around now.

That is great to hear! Sounds like you were able to compound experience by focusing on an area that is applicable across many companies.

The people I know got stuck doing customer conversions for an idiosyncratic power distribution management system. They learned some tricks to do conversions more efficiently, but they had very little experience they could carry to the next company (so they kept grinding many years for less than $70k / year)

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