I have been meaning to write this post for a while now. I have worked in almost every place except in a vendor and here are my findings.
Note: Every place is different and every experience is different, but I will try to make it as neutral and wholesome as possible.
- Working for a vendor. A vendor can be a great opportunity, depending on the vendor of course. When I talk about a vendor, the first company that comes to my mind is Cisco and the way they treat their people. You can get a good spot with a big vendor and lots of perks, including free drinks in the office, marketing gifts such as T-shirts, pens, tickets to events around the world and flexible working hours. The cons for working a vendor can be that you get specialized in one technology only (imagine being the SME for the Cisco 2960 switches and only that), and when the going gets tough, you are just a number for them. Cisco has fired thousands of people in 2020, trying to restructure the business for the new decade. If the vendor is small, you can get into a firefighting situation such as having a bad product that does not deliver and attracting the wrong customers who constantly complain because "they got what they paid for".
- Working for a VAR. This was my favorite spot in the industry since working for a VAR is mostly a project related job and the companies who buy services from a VAR are the ones who have money and interesting projects. The pros can be traveling, constantly learning new ways to use the product and always being in the edge of technology. A couple of bad things I have seen in VARs are that their offices are sometimes in the middle of nowhere/industrial areas and their salaries are not great; they tend to overpay that specific person with low social skills and high technical skills who manages to annoy their colleagues and forces them to quit.
- Working for an MSP. This has been the worst of my career experiences since the MSP tries to hunt for juicy projects like VARs, cannot deliver and settles for the same old boring stuff. I used to think that MSP were similar to VARs but boy I was wrong. There are MSPs who support legacy equipment and specialize in niche technologies. The pros can be that you can get a good salary and become a SME in your company; the bad things are that most of your service offerings are the same, leaving you with little room for improvement.
- Working in internal IT. This is again a gamble just like the other 3 options. There are companies that understand the value of IT and others that, sadly, do not. From the companies that understand its value, there are the ones who like to spend in innovative IT, and others who do not. So it's a gamble. For example, I once got a job offer for Ocado, a UK online only supermarket which uses AI and robots in their warehouses. Prior to talking to anyone in an interview, I had to take an IQ test. I thought "OK, that shouldn't be that hard." The IQ test was harder than I thought with questions like "A chair is to a pentagon what the table is to a _____ (circle, square, rectangle, hexagon)". It was gibberish to me, so I lost interest and intentionally failed the test. Don't get me wrong, some companies use a lot of in-house IT, but I guess those are the exceptions of the rule (such as Google and Facebook which are technically considered media companies but we all know they are not). The pros are that if they like you, you can get a nice, easy job with lots of money and be their god for knowing exactly what to fix. The cons are that you will probably be doing more spreadsheets and pointless meetings where you are in mute than actual work. And let's not forget that you may be doing nothing at all since the business doesn't really understand IT or how many people are actually needed.
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