Biggest Pros/Cons/Challenges of the fields you work in

[deanwebb]

Finally, as you get more senior you get to deal with more and more of the sales/planning/scoping/proposal-writing/PM/quality-control/vendor-chairman aspects of the job. Some techies absolutely despise this but its absolutely essential for success.

Same in the vendor space as well as the large company space. A senior/arch. role means not just designing the coolest stuff, you also gotta sell it. For a VAR and a vendor, the sales angle is obvious. But the internal sales job that a senior/arch. has to do is no less rigorous. You want to get $VENDOR into your deployment because it's way cool and way awesome and solves all your problems? Well, you better be taking a lot of notes in the PoC/Bake-off so that you can provide a range of technical reasons to go with $VENDOR. These reasons better be more than "4% improved throughput", too.

And you can't have the impression of being a $VENDOR fanboy if it's a product that will replace an entrenched vendor. You may very well be a fanboy, but keep that in the comm closet, my friend.

The politics are different for dealing with established relationships, but there's still politics. Do we change our licensing agreement? Are we ready to do an EoL refresh? Is this VAR arrangement as good as a competing VAR's offer? How are our outsourcing partners doing? Should we get a new clause in the contract? Are you getting traction on that TAC case? Do we need to escalate? If so, do we escalate with the vendor or with our purchasing/legal people?

Working for a vendor though, it's cool to be a fanboy for the product made by your company. I like that a lot.