[JonnyNova]

Mess with stuff in your free time. Most of the time people won't want to hire you to lead implementation/designing things unless you have experience doing it which can be a pretty nasty catch-22. Having some side projects side steps that and puts you ahead of a lot of your peers.

Also have a clear sense of direction of where you want to be going and what you want to be doing. Without that management and mentors won't know how to push you along and might come to expect you to remain in the same position for longer than you expect to.

[SimbaOnSteroids]

I'm not actually really suited for programming but I love tech and problem solving, like I do write stuff in my free time, I just take forever to get anything done. I've taken up going to as many hackathons as I can, I've attended 2 this semester and know of at least 2 more I'm going to be at. However when I'm at these things I rarely find myself writing any actual code and more of just making sure everyone is on task and finding resources for everyone to leverage. I find myself acting as a project manager most of the time. I don't know how that's going to look to an employer, but the teams I'm on build stuff that apparently the judges like.

Idk if these events count towards experience, but I feel like I'm getting better and better at getting people to the end goal.

[JonnyNova]

Those are really valuable skills too. There is a slant for engineering here since the site is for, by, of engineers. I recently joined a new team and we have a totally kick-ass technical product manager we work with pretty heavily. He is an absolute boon to the team when it comes to interfacing with different parts of management and being able to walk to the talk of the specifics of certain technologies.

For your last point, I'd be cognizant of being able to measure your value objectively somehow. It can be easy to get left behind if the value you provided didn't get tracked because people were only paying attention to lines of code.

[jimbokun]

Good project managers are incredibly valuable resources.

The system architecture really isn’t part of the project manager’s role. Leave that to the programmers.