Why don't the best techies work in the channel? I'm OK at Firewall One, but any number of people reading this are better, completing the tasks 10 times more quickly and screwing up 10 times less often. But I'm a better employee than you are. Firstly, a consultancy or reseller is going to be selling me by time, methodically setting up firewall rules taking a day is more …
"The honesty is in the pay structure, which is basically of the form: Business Development : OTE £150K + car + wealth creation package; Pre Sales Support: up to £75K (including bonus); Post Sales Support : up to 40K + bens."
It's probably worth noting that even if you are the undervalued post-sales support earning 40k, your income is still higher than 95% of the UK's population, according to the Institute for Financial Studies.
Oh, that's alright then. Call me selfish but, personally, I only give a shit about the pay the 1 receives (not the 1% or even the 5%). Judging by some of what I've witnessed over the years, a lot of the 95% really should have paid more attention in school or have developed a smidgeon of ambition.
As long as there's perverse incentives goading people to make money doing entirely the wrong thing, they'll keep on doing exactly that. And in computing it goes pretty deep, starting with the idea that software ought to be "intuitive", and vendors promising that their software doesn't require people to get trained, honest, eventually helping give rise to, among other things, the proverbial wilfully ignorant customer demanding the wrong thing. Also a management angle, bad examples of which abound. I could draw a couple more lines between some more dots but it's too hot to properly pick the whole thing apart and fsck it, I'm not getting paid to be part of the solution, either. Properly identifying the incentives and fixing them to be less perverse thus left as an exercise. Whether this can be done without overhauling the entire thing? I haven't the faintest.
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OK, so the vendors all stretch the truth, FUD each other, and the resellers are often not complteley honest about either their skills, the product or their ability to deliver. Thing is, if they all told the gospel truth, I wouldn't have a job! I'm employed to weed out the FUD, sift through the male-bovine-manure for the real info, anticipate where the insultants will "unexpectedly" fall short, and translate the sales-speak into something my bosses can make a decision based upon. TBH, if they all actually did work on the basis of "what's best for the customer" rather than "what's best for my bottomline" I wouldn't be needed.
I've worked there, but never called it 'The Channel', I'm guessing it's a sales buzzword? Either way, I ended up leaving the resellers and outsourcers I worked for, because I got sick and tired of being treated like shit, paid naff all and getting constantly stressed out that I wasn't actually helping anyone, except my director to make more money, which is very much NOT what I got into this game for!
I even ran my own little outsourcing outfit for a while, but I went bust, because I couldn't lie to customers and did a good job, priced honestly and only provided what was actually needed. Some might say I should have hired a sales guy to do the selling and then just get on with it, but I would have felt far too dirty!
A few years ago I got out of it all, went to work for an insurance company as their IT manager and now I work in cloud, for a medium - large international startup, doing back line support of all things. I'm treated considerably better, I get great pay, great benefits, work from home, plenty of time off, sick pay, it's kinda wicked really, but the problem now, as someone else said, is what next? I'm being approached recently for CIO roles, CTO roles, Technical Directorships, but do I really want to go back to working in an office, with a bunch of idiots I don't want to be around, trussed up in a suit and tie, licking the arse of the guy above me and sweet talking suppliers I know are going to rip me off? FUCK NO!
Problem is of course, I don't really want to go out on my own again either, as it was cold out there, because I'm too nice, too honest and too good at what I do for my own good. I could stay where I am in cloud, wait for my annual pay review, which is likely to follow inflation, but not much more, as I'm a massively under-used resource these days. My other option of course, is to go contractor, but in development again, instead of systems. I'm being approached recently, for PHP and Perl roles of all things, worth over £90k if you're contracting. Then of course the downside comes, you have to run it as a Ltd VAT registered company, any time off you take, you lose all your pay, no healthcare benefits, or extra time off to stop you from burning out.
To sum up? Why don't the best techies work in the channel? Because we've already been there, got the FUCK OUT and are not going back, in any capacity, for all the money, magic beans, coffee, mountain dew and stupid bonus reward schemes that make us feel like sales pricks, in the world! You can keep your channel, you can keep your stupid rewards schemes, your pink shirts, your frilly, smilie talk and just get bent! The decent techies do the real work, that you lot who choose to stay in the channel and play the game, are not capable of!
Seeing the opposite out here. Older people are in such high demand (due to the flood of under-40s,) that they command a stiff premium over the 20 and 30 somethings. Doesn't matter what your credentials are here, there is strict ageism in place.
Young folks are viewed as "reckless," "volatile," "lazy" and "too entitled." They complain about working 16 hours a day for $16/hr and keep asking for raises, better working conditions etc.
The old folks just ask for the high salaries up front, put up with far more miserable working conditions and don't come back pestering management every 6-18 months looking for more money.
‘course, all the companies around here are owned by folks 50-80, none of whom have any intention of retiring any time soon. They just don’t understand “these arrogant kids these days.” Want people they can relate to. Etc.
It's why I started my own consultancy. They're far happier to pay you by the hour some rediculous rate than they are to pay you a decent salary as a permie. Just bizzare.
Being one of those smaller consultancy players I think you're setting a wrong example.
"Firstly, a consultancy or reseller is going to be selling me by time, methodically setting up firewall rules taking a day is more profitable than someone who knows the trick to doing it in an hour."
That's where you're wrong, and your own article even supports this. Because this approach will only upset your client in the longer run. And no matter what age we live in: the customer is /always/ the customer. Aka; the one who hopefully will help pay for your salary.
Yes, my firm also sells by time. But we make very sure that the customer realizes what he gets for that time. If you ask us to check up your firewall and "enhance it" then obviously it takes time. We'd need to study your environment and know how it has been setup /before/ we apply any changes. That has NOTHING to do with "increasing sale time", but /everything/ with doing a job best as possible. Unless of course you'd rather see that we quickly implement the changes you requested without even fully knowing ourselves that it won't clash with other stuff.
Needless to say... Would you have asked us to provision your server and then ask us to implement a specific change then guess what? Because we will at that time be fully familiar with your environment - up front - the changes will probably only take... 5 minutes ?
IMO you're drawing the wrong conclusions.
Because in the end a customer who will stick with us for the upcoming years to come is MUCH more profitable to us than merely trying to cash in extra time and get a few extra bucks. Just read your own article; obviously you only met parties which did went after the extra cash and from what I'm reading you're not very fond of their services anymore.
How is that "more profitable" ?
I worked for the Department of Education as a sysadmin and general IT support/trainer. I'm good at what I do and so I would stamp out fires and get things working in short time. I worked really hard for 3 months redesigning everything and was a very busy little beaver. After the setup period was over, I would often sit around in my office with nothing much to do because everything was working perfectly.
The boss saw me doing a lot of serious work for 3 months, then saw me shift to "non-core" work (I was redesigning IT training manuals for the teachers, not fiddling with cables and computers anymore) and so he sacked me on the assumption that I had become lazy and that a cheaper replacement could carry on the work because I had created a good foundation.
My replacement was a PFY with about 1 year's IT education and everything has gone to shit. He even stopped the weekly backup because the hard disk got full. My old work colleagues ring me about 3 times a week with the latest stories of incompetence and how they had to hire contractors to fix issues that any decent IT guy should be able to fix. So far, they have spent 3 years worth of my old wages on contractors.
TL;DR?
In an effort to save money, they hired a crap worker and ended up costing themselves triple. Sometimes, the best IT techies shoot themselves in the foot by being too good.
After all, it's your boss his job to understand what he's hiring. It also gives the lie to the idea that underlings are nary but "person boxes" to management, ie they're all human and the rest is equally homogenous in unimportance, in turn giving rise to the idea that an MBA is all you need for bossing people around. He really should've understood what you were doing; lacking that he should've obtained that understanding somehow, like by asking.
Of course you could've tried and helped, but you know, there's a point where going above and beyond the call of duty gets ridiculous, and it can also get you your feet shot off. Knowing where and when to stop is a skill, too. So I'd say he got what he deserved, except of course that his management won't let him go for his poor judgement, and his charges are worse off for it. A set that no longer includes you, of course.
No upvote because TL;DR, which I hate with a passion. If you feel the need to include it you've done a poor job writing, or you've misunderstood your audience.
The kind of work environments described by Dominic are the logical outcome of a world that is being increasingly run by mediocre HR drones, clueless execs, accountants and banks. No risk taking, no entrepreneurship, no balls left on anyone really. Success is measured by how many dollars are (or appear to be) wrung out of customers and staff.
This will not change until all of the talented people walk out, provide a better service and let cr*p consultancies and companies wither on the vine. If anything, today's world is full of opportunities for talented and skilled people. One of these is to locate these same customers who are busily getting reamed by their suppliers and propose and deliver something better.
I've also felt the sting of being too good at my job. Worked happily for years with people I knew and trusted, did great things and made the company a lot of money. I then watched a new CIO (I stood for Idiotic) come in, over-staff the pace with his cronies and kick out everyone else who had built him this lucrative money pit. Pretty soon, my services were no longer needed. To be fair, the new implementation I put into place no longer needed me to run it. But a company run by sentient human beings would have said great.. thanks, here's another challenge, get on with it.
Unfortunately, companies are often run by people who provide little or no inspiration to their work force. Eventually, tech people and customers will see through this deception and move on. If you are smart, experienced and skilled, you might be one of those people who will help fix things and get them back on track. In the process, you might as well charge what the market will bear even if it doesn't feel good.
Until people go back to first principles and start to value honesty, hard work, knowledge values and performance again it will only get worse.
Hang on, it just means "sales" doesn't it?
You get a salesman to do the install which looks all professional until your client suddenly thinks, "Hang on, I've never met a decent techie who could sell." And, indeed, vice versa.
This makes much more sense to me but it does reduce Dominic's article to, "The reason techies don't work in the channel is that the good ones are no good at sales."
AMPC talks of a "lack of vision", I'd rephrase that as deciding that there is more money to be made from squeezing existing customers rather than sucking in new ones.
That's why firms like Oracle behave the way they do, they believe that nearly everyone who will ever buy into the Oracle product line has already done so. Yes they can squabble over some MS SQL accounts and maybe Sybase, but realistically it's bloody hard to change your main DB.
That's why Oracle squeezes its customers and is so arrogant when dealing with them, it knows they can't easily move. Even is MS SQL, DB2 or Sybase were free the cost of moving would be vastly more than their latest antics.
Fact is that is the way most corporate IT is now only edge cases and new front ends get changed much.
So again I come back to the point that the cause of vendor behaviour is their clients, that's not so much "blame" as causality.
Although many ITPRos don't want to do sales, I think that the best person to sell "complex" goods is someone who understands it. The politics of most sales teams stops that from working properly, they fixate on "closing" and tech skills are slagged, but "trustworthy" has two meanings, not only honesty but reliability and I don't believe anything beats talking to a guy who has made they thing you're buying do the job you're paying real money to happen.
"I think that the best person to sell "complex" goods is someone who understands it. "
Speaking as someone who occasionally *buys* stuff, the person I'm most likely to buy from is someone who looks like they could make their product solve my problem. In my experience, that usually requires *some* technical competence, if only because *I* am a techie and therefore bother to think about what the words mean. If you are just spouting buzzwords, I'm going to spot it.
Now, if you are selling to someone who hasn't a clue what their own problem is, you don't need technical skills at all. You need to be able to make the buyer think that their own failure to understand their own problem is not an issue because your product will not only solve the problem but also teach them what it was. The whole exercise becomes purely an exercise in make-believe.
I suspect that the reality of most sales pitches lies somewhere in between.
The unfortunate reality is that when it takes one person (a master) 1 hour to do something and another person (a journeyman) takes 4, and the client is willing to pay for up to 4 hours of work, then it doesn't make business sense to send the master to fix it.
There is even a double dis-incentive: the journeyman is more likely to produce a fix that will require further fixes and further billing.
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