Blessay: Working for a Reseller or End User Is Different Like Doctoring and Parenting

I often get into career dis­cus­sions with Engineers in the IT industry about the com­par­at­ive bene­fits of work­ing for either a Vendor /​ Reseller or work­ing for End Users. Having worked at a Reseller for more than 10 years, and now hav­ing worked for End Users for the last six or seven it is becom­ing clear what how wide the gulf is between these two broad career choices. I have often struggled to find a suit­able ana­logy that adequately explained the dif­fer­ence and explain the differences.

Syntax — Generalisations and Groupings

For this Blessay I am going to group all jobs to either Reseller or End User to make it pos­sible to write. I accept this is a broad brush, but

Reseller — I will use the term Reseller to cover both Vendor, Consulting and Reseller com­pan­ies as a gen­eral term. I regard Consultancy as Resellers, since they merely ‘resell’ the know­ledge or exper­i­ence of their staff, pos­sible with a pro­cess attached.

Vendors — refers to man­u­fac­tur­ers such as Cisco, or vari­ous con­sultan­cies that provide pro­fes­sional ser­vices only. For most roles, the profit motive remains string.

Although there are engin­eers that work for vendors that do purely internal work, such as cod­ing or design, they have lim­ited inter­fa­cing with cus­tom­ers and aren’t part of this article.

End Users — The con­sumer of your goods and ser­vices. Reseller/​Vendors use the term Customer or Client.

Working Life at Resellers

As an engin­eer at a Reseller, I would typ­ic­ally work on a range of dif­fer­ent tech­no­lo­gies. A reseller needs to cover a lot of ground in know­ledge and exper­i­ence to be able to meet an End Users needs. This is because every End User is, at least, slightly dif­fer­ent to another, and usu­ally very dif­fer­ent. A reseller also has good access to vendor resources such as train­ing mater­ial, doc­u­ment­a­tion, bet­ter sup­port access and prob­ably rela­tion­ships with key people.

As a reseller, you only make money by selling some­thing (any­thing) to your End Users, there­fore you need enough ‘breadth’ to be able to offer a solu­tion and pos­sibly make the deal. That breadth might be a selec­tion of vendors, or a wide enough range of technologies.

In short, a lot of tech­no­logy, at lim­ited depth bal­anced against var­ied experiences.

Working Life at End Users

Compare this with the work­ing life of an engin­eer at the End User. You focus on spe­cific and rel­ev­ant sys­tems that apply in your work­place. You will spend a cer­tain amount of time apply­ing solu­tions in addi­tion to your tech­nical require­ments. You have con­text, situ­ational aware­ness, and under­stand the busi­ness need /​ prob­lem and work to solve problems.

End users have access to tech­nical sup­port, but often at a lower level than resellers, and broadly, less access to tech­nical support.

The Art of Parenting your IT infrastructure

When I think about the dif­fer­ences between these roles, it struck me that there are strong ana­log between the dif­fer­ent ways that a Doctor and a Parent works with a Child.

If you can ima­gine that your IT infra­struc­ture needs con­stant care and atten­tion, feed­ing, dress­ing and edu­ca­tion in a sim­ilar way that a child does, then you can ima­gine that an End User is like a Parent. A Parent feeds a child every day, gives them hugs and sup­port, and guides them down a path for life.

An End User is con­stantly tun­ing, guid­ing and work­ing on their Infrastructure in a sim­ilar way. By focus­sing on that one child, that one infra­struc­ture, you can nur­ture accord­ing to the path that your busi­ness needs. Its a con­tinual process.

The Reseller is more like a Doctor. Occasionally, a Parent needs to turn to external source for inter­ven­tion, maybe for a med­ical event, or for spe­cial­ist advice or some­thing out­side of their exper­i­ence. The Doctor provides spe­cial­ist, tech­nical and abstract sup­port or ser­vice that helps to address prob­lems or resolve issues.

Differences

A Doctor isn’t com­mit­ted to the Child like a Parent. But the Doctor has some skill, or exper­i­ence, or tech­no­logy that can help to improve the Child. Maybe health, or life ser­vices, but their inter­ven­tion is short term, spe­cific and specialist.

But a Parent has to live and work with that Child every­day. They know it’s tem­pera­ment, and how it will react in a given situ­ation. It’s a very dif­fer­ent role.

Choosing to work for a Reseller or an End user ?

For me, the choice to stop work­ing for Reseller’s came down to simple com­par­ison. While work­ing for a Reseller, life was excit­ing and moved at a very fast pace. I learnt a lot of tech­no­logy really quickly, and exper­i­enced a lot of dif­fer­ent mar­ket­places. In one week I could work for a bank, a ware­house and retailer and handle mul­tiple dif­fer­ent tech­no­lo­gies. It’s stim­u­lat­ing, chal­len­ging but didn’t ful­fil my need to build the whole sys­tem and main­tain it. And it’s all about mak­ing a fast and fat profit mar­gin, which ulti­mately was not satisfying.

I missed the oppor­tun­ity to build, and grow, and work on a pro­ject all the way until it ended. It’s reas­on­ably rare that Resellers get to imple­ment and main­tain a sys­tem. And design­ing for oper­a­tional excel­lence is what we all claim to do but, in real­ity, Resellers get to do very little oper­a­tional work and thus can’t really under­stand it. The profit motive still exists for an End User, but it’s very dif­fer­ent because we can focus on real oper­a­tional costs, includ­ing the hid­den ones, and make gradual changes over months and years.

What do you choose ?

Like all life choices, you need to think about your per­son­al­ity, and what you want from life. Working in the Reseller com­munity can offer travel, and change, and excite­ment. But you rarely get the sat­is­fac­tion of see­ing some­thing work and the pres­sure to make a profit mar­gin is enormous.

The End User has a more pre­dict­able path, slower mov­ing but with a lot more involve­ment of people and pro­cesses. And a real focus on deliv­er­ing busi­ness out­comes instead of profit can be a lot more satisfying.

It’s a Choice You Make

That’s why I think it’s career choice that sim­ilar to the dif­fer­ence between how a Parent and Doctor looks after your chil­dren. Both are neces­sary, both equally com­mit­ted, and both with import­ant skills, but with very dif­fer­ent view­points on what’s import­ant and on what is a suc­cess. I sug­gest you keep this in mind when you make your next career choice.

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