I feel that the bridge between software engineer and systems architect comes through scale, maturation, and integration. Today a BS in computer science covers

I feel that the bridge between software engineer and systems architect comes through scale, maturation, and integration. Today a BS in computer science covers a wide range of topics outside of syntax and databases. On the day you graduate, you have a set of hard skills writing code that are likely immediately applicable to a job and you also have more abstract theoretical instruction related to real world scale, deployments. There are also types of problems that are very difficult to teach in a classroom setting. Those things where the core code works fine, but in a scaled production implementation, it’s not meeting the mark. Success there usually involves iterations over weeks or months to get a working solution. Being a really great systems architect involves mixing the hard technical skills with the softer qualitative skills learned along the way.