SMB vs Enterprise
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@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
Thinking about this I would be a generalist, although I focus on Applications, Infrastructure, and Systems Administration.
Essentially anyone outside of the enterprise is a generalist. Specialists only exist, for all intents and purposes, in large and enterprise companies and/or in IT shops that provide speciality services. There is no place in the SOHO, SMB, SME or Medium markets for specialists in house.
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@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
Thinking about this I would be a generalist, although I focus on Applications, Infrastructure, and Systems Administration.
Essentially anyone outside of the enterprise is a generalist. Specialists only exist, for all intents and purposes, in large and enterprise companies and/or in IT shops that provide speciality services. There is no place in the SOHO, SMB, SME or Medium markets for specialists in house.
Not sure if I would enjoy specializing. I really like the diversity of what I'm working on.
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@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
Thinking about this I would be a generalist, although I focus on Applications, Infrastructure, and Systems Administration.
Essentially anyone outside of the enterprise is a generalist. Specialists only exist, for all intents and purposes, in large and enterprise companies and/or in IT shops that provide speciality services. There is no place in the SOHO, SMB, SME or Medium markets for specialists in house.
Not sure if I would enjoy specializing. I really like the diversity of what I'm working on.
I thought the same thing too, but I enjoy specializing more than I ever thought I would. In fact, I wonder why I was a generalist for so long.
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@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
Thinking about this I would be a generalist, although I focus on Applications, Infrastructure, and Systems Administration.
Essentially anyone outside of the enterprise is a generalist. Specialists only exist, for all intents and purposes, in large and enterprise companies and/or in IT shops that provide speciality services. There is no place in the SOHO, SMB, SME or Medium markets for specialists in house.
Not sure if I would enjoy specializing. I really like the diversity of what I'm working on.
I like it, you get to really get into things and get in deep. It might feel less diverse in some ways, but in other ways it is more diverse.
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@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
Thinking about this I would be a generalist, although I focus on Applications, Infrastructure, and Systems Administration.
Essentially anyone outside of the enterprise is a generalist. Specialists only exist, for all intents and purposes, in large and enterprise companies and/or in IT shops that provide speciality services. There is no place in the SOHO, SMB, SME or Medium markets for specialists in house.
Not sure if I would enjoy specializing. I really like the diversity of what I'm working on.
I thought the same thing too, but I enjoy specializing more than I ever thought I would. In fact, I wonder why I was a generalist for so long.
Being a specialist in Linux, as an example, means moving from doing lots of package installs and deploying filesystems to kernel tuning and tweaks that take a lot of research and knowledge. You get diversity in other ways, like learning about schedulers, kernel properties, slabs and stuff like that. Things that generalists rarely even realize exist let alone touch all fo the time.
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@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
Unless you are the elite of the elite and working with tools like Ansible, it's uncommon for Windows Admins to get beyond about 30 servers per admin in production.
That's ~where we are right now actually, slightly higher.
You aren't in a business, though. So the need for uptime doesn't exist. That makes higher density a lot easier.
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@scottalanmiller You pay them what the value is of the guy who swaps toner in the printer, because WTF would you pay someone 140K who swaps out toner....
Pay tends to trend down based on the lowest level skill things you do.
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@scottalanmiller My Paternity benefits are 15 weeks paid. No SMB could afford to offer that.
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@scottalanmiller We have business units (mine is ~500 people) that are smaller silo's but there's a lot of stuff that we don't have to deal with. We still consume core IT services (Email, IaaS, HR, ERP, VDI) and only really have "islands" of infrastructure for our R&D teams.
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@John-Nicholson said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller My Paternity benefits are 15 weeks paid. No SMB could afford to offer that.
In italy any company has to grant 9 month full salary to be splitted between father/mother. then you can has for extra time with halved salary. it is fixed by law. of course company can give bonuses but it doesn't happen.
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@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Dashrender said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@coliver said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Dashrender said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Jimmy9008 said in SMB vs Enterprise:
I'm a generalist too; I don't think that puts me at a disadvantage compared to specialists. Where many specialists would get caught up on a project, I have a range of experience which will get me past that problem.
That is a key point. In enterprise, you take a very small amount of responsibility for specific functions vs doing everything across the board. It's both good and bad, but at the end of the day you'll learn more if you have to do everything. Although you may not master a specific area.
Do you have an example of a specialist role? I'd like to see how they compare to a generalist role...
There are so many examples. Let's just take a look at a windows server admin. There is a team for handling group policy, several builds, server patching, server OS troubleshooting, application support for specific applications (these are the guys troubleshooting with the vendors), package deployment, and more.
You probably do alot more than sever admin in SMB. You're evaluating products, talking vendors, deploying actual physical hardware like racks and servers, configuring network equipment, and many more roles that aren't windows admin related.
I see what you mean, but never assumed that to be specialist.
What did you assume them to be?
Yeah, I am not sure what you were expecting? I am just using a very broad role (windows admin) as an example of how many sub specialist roles you might see in enterprise. I am pretty sure I missed some
Me neither, hence asking
Maybe i'm not a generalist, but just assumed I am. GPOs, Patching, Server Deployments etc, I do all of them... so am I a specialist!? lol
No. A Specialist does 1 or maybe 2 of those roles.
But why? They are easy roles. It is not special at all to be good at 1 or 2 of them. They are easy. I'd guess boring if all you do all day is any particular 1 or 2 of them. Specialist feels like the wrong word.
Yes, you do 1 or 2 of those things, but they are not difficult or special things. You are just solely dedicated to one of them...
A shelve stacker at a supermarket only stacks shelves all day... they are not a specialist. If you just do GPO all day, why are you a specialist...
Because you're specializing in GPO? Literally the definition of the word specialist. GPO is a massive beast with so many options and a vast amount of functionality that SMBs rarely touch even a fraction of it. The same goes for AD, patching, servers, etc... etc...
I see. I thought when applied to jobs it had more meaning. So, I could leave and just focus on only one thing, something easy... like say, installing and restoring from Veeam Endpoint Free. Then I could call myself a specialist...?
I find it odd how you consider these things to be easy. as coliver said - GPO has thousands of options. When dealing with 10's of thousands of machines, having to control a ton of aspects of a machine, GPOs can be daunting.
The same can be said for dealing with backups. There are tons of options and things to be concerned about - did the backup actually grab a usable copy of the database? did logs get pruned correctly? do restores work as expected, and on and on.
Yes, agree somewhat - but I don't consider them to be extremely difficult. Everything has things to be concerned about. The questions on the backup for example, yes - concerns, no - not difficult.
You could have guys in operations that are 100% focused on Veeam or SRM.
Testing of backups, verification of replica's, orchestrating DR fail-overs in a multi-tenant environment. That said even in large enterprises it's rare that you have anyone 100% focused on something this granular as installing an agent. The reality is you get a team who's focused on say storage and DR, and you outsource or pay for automation tools to avoid having anyone deploy an agent manually. This raises a good point.
A LOT of SMB skills on the lower end become useless in a large enterprise because those roles are outsourced, or automated.
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@scottalanmiller The enterprise is way more diverse.
I don't know Scott, I think being in the enterprise means everyone is just a guy who is an expert at 1 skill or app and would be helpless if dropped in a SMB. It's SOOO NARROW and soooo focused!
Lets look at the life of a dedicated "VDI architect in the enterprise and at how "Narrow" his job is.
- Profile virtualization and layering solutions.
- Storage (block for image management, and NAS for profiles or app layers)
- WAN optimization. Nothing breaks ICX, or PCoIP like an incorrectly applied DSCP TAG!
- TFTP/DHCP as you need to make sure those Zero clients pull down their image!
- Syslog, and some sort of log analytics platform (LogInsight, Splunk etc) as you'll be needing this to troubleshoot your platform.
- A hypervisor (and generally to a bizarre level as you'll be invoking features that the server guys don't use, and you'll be hitting the corner cases of scale for things like VMFS when running 200 desktops on a host, or vGPU pass thru).
- Applications. To deploy non-persistent VDI you'll need to know how to use visualized registries, application packaging (ThinApp, App-V, AppVolumes) and dark corners of the registry sometimes.
- Customer service! because if you don't know how people are using stuff and be talking to the users problems will brew...
- How to build training guides as you need to build training materials for your operate trainers to push out.
- Need to be familiar possible with MDM solutions to cover corner cases where VDI doesn't work as well as how to automate thi
- Networking. Proper VDI clusters tons of VLAN's and can often invoke some more obscure things like PVLAN's and DMZ's.
- Security. Get ready to learn NSX microsegmentation and automation. You'll need to learn vRNI or some kind of netflow analyzer to figure out what your ACL's need to look like. Also get ready to learn F5 or NetScaler to do your load balancing and edge inspection. Even if your not the guy managing the firewall rules expect to have to learn it anyways for when your edge security team forgets to open UDP for PCoIP, you'll need to know how to test and verify that the ports are open.
- DNS. Because NOTHING will work without this. Bonus points for learning GSLB deployments with this so you can do automated VDI failover to the DR site.
- Antivirus. Since normal regular agent based deployments will break a host, get ready to learn hypervisor based inspection tools and deployments.
Now it's true that some of these would be handled by other teams, but if you don't know how to explain your ask of those teams (or don't have 100% Competent people in those teams) get ready for your VDI deployment to get stuck for 6 months in ITIL change control hell.
BTW, I'm only joking. In some shops the VDI guys can often wear other hats too.
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@John-Nicholson said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller You pay them what the value is of the guy who swaps toner in the printer, because WTF would you pay someone 140K who swaps out toner....
Pay tends to trend down based on the lowest level skill things you do.
Tends to, which is why most SMB IT people get paid like juniors in the enterprise, at best, or more often like bench techs. But not always, I've seen shops paying $160K for people who are actually sub-junior in the enterprise.
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@John-Nicholson said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller My Paternity benefits are 15 weeks paid. No SMB could afford to offer that.
Yeah, the whole "our entire IT staff is gone for months all at once" thing is tough unless SMBs smarten up and move to all MSP model.
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@matteo-nunziati said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@John-Nicholson said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller My Paternity benefits are 15 weeks paid. No SMB could afford to offer that.
In italy any company has to grant 9 month full salary to be splitted between father/mother. then you can has for extra time with halved salary. it is fixed by law. of course company can give bonuses but it doesn't happen.
So the father/mother get to pick whose employer has to pay? Any given employer might pay zero or the full nine months?
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@John-Nicholson said in SMB vs Enterprise:
A LOT of SMB skills on the lower end become useless in a large enterprise because those roles are outsourced, or automated.
This is a huge factor. A huge percentage of what SMBs run around doing every day is all scripted in the enterprise. The difference between a one line script installing hundreds or thousands of applications on machines that are never logged into versus one guy waiting for a GUI to pop up over RDP to manually download and install by double clicking on an icon is a huge difference in time wasted for the same task. The cost of growing in the enterprise can be nearly free.
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@John-Nicholson said in SMB vs Enterprise:
I don't know Scott, I think being in the enterprise means everyone is just a guy who is an expert at 1 skill or app and would be helpless if dropped in a SMB. It's SOOO NARROW and soooo focused!
I caught the sarcasm
I never see the focus being as narrow as that and good foundational knowledge applies broadly. Like even though enterprise windows admins never do networking, I've found that by far enterprise windows admins are more likely to know more about networking than SMB generalists. Not always, but more often than not.
The reality is that small shop generalists actually tend to get pretty focused too, even moreso than enterprise people. The difference is that they don't get focused on an IT area but a weird smattering of tasks unique to the organization at hand. All different from one another (company to company) but nothing you can predict, prepare for or escape. One shop might spend 80% of the time supporting end users desk side, another does application deployments all day, another just resets passwords or manages printers. Almost everyone I know in an SMB role has a very repetitive role, but not one that matches any technology set.
The real place where you get variety is the MSP and consulting world.
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@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@matteo-nunziati said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@John-Nicholson said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller My Paternity benefits are 15 weeks paid. No SMB could afford to offer that.
In italy any company has to grant 9 month full salary to be splitted between father/mother. then you can has for extra time with halved salary. it is fixed by law. of course company can give bonuses but it doesn't happen.
So the father/mother get to pick whose employer has to pay? Any given employer might pay zero or the full nine months?
European work law is great, especially if you have a family. It's similar to Italy or better in most European countries.
In the U.S., it's hardcore capitalism... all about pinching pennies and screwing the employees if need be. There's a lot of exceptions (of course, like where John Nicholson works, and my employer is great), but generally speaking I mean. If you have a higher position in an F500 company it is most likely OKAY. But still, never even close to how good it is in Europe. That's why they are always named the happiest countries, especially the Scandinavian counties and Canada.
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SMB cause you get more fun doing everything wrong and then learning from the experience, so on the next SMB you get it right.
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@Tim_G said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@matteo-nunziati said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@John-Nicholson said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller My Paternity benefits are 15 weeks paid. No SMB could afford to offer that.
In italy any company has to grant 9 month full salary to be splitted between father/mother. then you can has for extra time with halved salary. it is fixed by law. of course company can give bonuses but it doesn't happen.
So the father/mother get to pick whose employer has to pay? Any given employer might pay zero or the full nine months?
European work law is great, especially if you have a family. It's similar to Italy or better in most European countries.
In most ways, yes. The problem is that it sometimes creates extreme hardship on employers which, in turn, results in fewer jobs which is a contributor to why so unemployment is as high as it is. And foreign investors often choose to avoid the market because the costs of doing business are so ridiculously high. This sends often highly skilled jobs to other markets which would be perfect to have had in Europe.
