How can I gain practical experience in these things? The jobs I've had mainly revolve around adding new features, not doing any of the things described in the article. Does working at bigger companies actually give you experience with this?
Enterprise architects usually do not work at large enterprises, but consult to them. In consulting you typically would have risen through the dev stages (junior 1st year, medior 2nd-3rd, senior from 2nd or 3rd onwards (ikr), then onto solution architect (tech lead on small projects ~300k), a few technical analyst team roles on large projects (several M$), experience in a key role in such a project such as Lead Integration Architect, en then onto Enterprise Architect jobs. Note that for anything beyond the solution architect stage your political and managerial skills will become as or even more important than your technical progression.
Alternatively you could be the tech person in a 2 man startup that lucks onto success and grab onto your seat in a wild ride and just never let go.
Where I work, we have Architects but they often play a supporting/consulting role and the teams are expected to learn and implement most of the things listed in this article. They will push you to make good decisions, and will want to vet your designs, but they aren't dictating this stuff from on high (unless of course you're making really poor choices). It's been great because no matter who you are or what role you play on the team (I'm primarily a FE dev) you can learn as much of this stuff as you want. I have to imagine its the same at other companies, so anyway, what I'm saying is you can get a ton of experience in all of this kind of stuff without being an actual Architect at some places (we're a large company). The flip side of that coin here is that it's VERY difficult to get the actual title of Architect; it's a very limited role and it takes a lot more than just systems knowledge to get there (i.e. politics). A lot of the people I've worked with who are Senior level could probably easily transition into a systems architect position at other companies. I'm not sure if this is the best way to get there if that's what you're interested in though, just giving you some food for thought. I don't know how you identify companies where you can get this kind of experience, but if you're interviewing you should ask about "you build it you run it" or stuff like that to see how they manage their infrastructure, that might give you a hint.
Build something that exercises the gaps you want to fill and you'll learn from it. Make your code open source and there's your proof of knowledge. Unless the thing you build is in production with reasonable traffic you won't get to truly experience some of the good or not-so-good decisions you made but at least you made decisions and have some experience.
Yes and no, depends. It gives such experience to a software architect, otherwise not really. Tho, software architects do a lot more than just systems design (tho, that is pretty much their main task). But yes, you get a job as a software architect or something like an "in-training" one, helping one, etc. at a big corporation to get such experience (I'd argue that small companies only need some code design, you want a lot of systems/software design you should go for a big corporation)
It happens from time to time, but yes - there is no specific job / hiring for this.
The default/common path is evolving into the architect role which seems like a "bad" process of developing an architect.
The best way to develop a new architect, is to have him learn alongside a mentor/teacher who is an architect himself. Developing and architecture are very different jobs which require different mindsets and skills. Also, I've seen many places, teams, etc where people are mostly made to implement feature after feature with no time in between for learning, self-development, courses, etc.
Otherwise, after you've just "arrived" to that architect role you start learning on your own what architecture really is and means.
Developing and architecture are absolutely related. Many ideas seem great on paper till you go and implement them and find out the pain points. All the great architects have often been in the weeds of their systems.
> Does working at bigger companies actually give you experience with this?
If you can find someone who needs something for their business or organization, you'll learn a lot of this by working backwards from what they need and building it. So I would suggest the opposite: the smaller the organization the more you can jump around and set up the basics of all these things.
