The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors
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@carnival-boy said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
If anyone knows of a vacancy for an IT Manager where you don't actually have to do any work but still get a decent salary then please let me know, I'd love to apply!
Those don't tend to stay vacant long. I knew of one paying $150K, if you consider that good, recently. But as you can imagine, people lined up to fill it. Zero technical responsibilities and the old guy was fired for having stolen many hundreds of thousands of dollars and it eventually got "too obvious" to keep him.
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@carnival-boy said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
It's not a picture I recognise. Every IT manager I know or have met works pretty hard and are constantly having to justify their roles to prevent them being made redundant and/or outsourced. It's not an easy career. Maybe it's common in the US, but if so, it's definitely a harsher environment in the UK.
That's a different effect. And to some degree, you are seeing roles that we generally say shouldn't exist that need to defend themselves. That's unrelated to doing a good job or a bad one or the VAR issue or whatever, that's the "a role that doesn't make sense in an SMB problem."
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@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
I posted this over on the sysadmin subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8e4oli/is_there_really_a_var_kickback_system_that_it/
Not too many people agree with or like the post...
Well DUH, lol. They are the ones leveraging the system. Of course they will react passionately, that proves the point more than disproves it.
MSP says "SMBs should employ MSPs", internal IT says "SMBs should employ internal IT". There's no point being proven either way, just different viewpoints and lots of confirmation bias from both sides.
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@carnival-boy said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
I posted this over on the sysadmin subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8e4oli/is_there_really_a_var_kickback_system_that_it/
Not too many people agree with or like the post...
Well DUH, lol. They are the ones leveraging the system. Of course they will react passionately, that proves the point more than disproves it.
MSP says "SMBs should employ MSPs", internal IT says "SMBs should employ internal IT". There's no point being proven either way, just different viewpoints and lots of confirmation bias from both sides.
Yes, but one has simple math and logic. The other has nothing. There is no benefit to internal IT. It's costly and risky. MSPs can do anything internal IT can do, at the same price, but has more options. It's literally impossible to come up with any potential benefit to internal IT.
All arguments for the Internet IT model at small scale come from misinformation about MSPs. Like claiming that all resources are shared, that mark up is high, that they are not on site, etc.
Every positive argument for internal IT equally applies to MSPs. but not every MSP benefit applies to internal IT.
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@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
It's literally impossible to come up with any potential benefit to internal IT.
Er, ok.
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@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
I posted this over on the sysadmin subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8e4oli/is_there_really_a_var_kickback_system_that_it/
Not too many people agree with or like the post...
Well DUH, lol. They are the ones leveraging the system. Of course they will react passionately, that proves the point more than disproves it.
Wow. "They"? Reddit is a community just like this one. Just because it's not Mangolassi.it doesn't mean it should just be dismissed. Yes, there are VARs lurking there, but there are also thousands of IT folks of all levels.
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@carnival-boy said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
It's literally impossible to come up with any potential benefit to internal IT.
Er, ok.
It just is, because literally anything Internal IT can have as an "advantage" you can have with an MSP, too. There's no way for Internal IT to have some special feature.
Remember, Internal IT is just an MSP on payroll to the company. Whether MSP or Internal IT, it's all "another organization" to the company.
I've been talking about this for many years, and all points I've ever heard for internal IT are always based on total misconceptions about what an MSP is. Always assuming something that isn't true about them.
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@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
I posted this over on the sysadmin subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8e4oli/is_there_really_a_var_kickback_system_that_it/
Not too many people agree with or like the post...
Well DUH, lol. They are the ones leveraging the system. Of course they will react passionately, that proves the point more than disproves it.
Wow. "They"? Reddit is a community just like this one. Just because it's not Mangolassi.it doesn't mean it should just be dismissed. Yes, there are VARs lurking there, but there are also thousands of IT folks of all levels.
I'm dismissing people who are reacting negatively to something that is really obvious and well known; not dismissing Reddit. That "most" people take offence to it is expected.
But Reddit is not like ML, ML is a pro tech community, Reddit is an open forum.
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@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
Yes, there are VARs lurking there, but there are also thousands of IT folks of all levels.
It isn't the VARs that generally take offense, once in a while, but rarely. VARs operate in a world like this very openly most of the time. It's the customers of the VARs that are the ones that take offence. The ones at all levels. Remember, the point of the article wasn't just that this "can happen", we talked about how this is the norm. So by expectation going in, if you post in an open forum of IT workers, the point of the article was that most of them will be to some degree involved in this system. So you should expect that most people who will respond will be upset for getting called out on something that they likely either feel very badly about or are scared that someone will discover.
I'm not stating anything after the fact, I'm pointing out what was to be expected from the beginning.
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@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
I posted this over on the sysadmin subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8e4oli/is_there_really_a_var_kickback_system_that_it/
Not too many people agree with or like the post...
Well DUH, lol. They are the ones leveraging the system. Of course they will react passionately, that proves the point more than disproves it.
Wow. "They"? Reddit is a community just like this one. Just because it's not Mangolassi.it doesn't mean it should just be dismissed. Yes, there are VARs lurking there, but there are also thousands of IT folks of all levels.
I'm dismissing people who are reacting negatively to something that is really obvious and well known; not dismissing Reddit. That "most" people take offence to it is expected.
But Reddit is not like ML, ML is a pro tech community, Reddit is an open forum.
I thought ML was also an open forum too.. And I'm not talking about reddit as a whole, I'm talking about the sysadmin subreddit -- also a pro tech community.
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@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
Yes, there are VARs lurking there, but there are also thousands of IT folks of all levels.
It isn't the VARs that generally take offense, once in a while, but rarely. VARs operate in a world like this very openly most of the time. It's the customers of the VARs that are the ones that take offence. The ones at all levels. Remember, the point of the article wasn't just that this "can happen", we talked about how this is the norm. So by expectation going in, if you post in an open forum of IT workers, the point of the article was that most of them will be to some degree involved in this system. So you should expect that most people who will respond will be upset for getting called out on something that they likely either feel very badly about or are scared that someone will discover.
I'm not stating anything after the fact, I'm pointing out what was to be expected from the beginning.
Right, I get that this certainly could be the case if what you are claiming is indeed the norm. I guess what it comes down to is like anything else: you should provide proof to backup your claims. Right now it's more or less just anecdotal evidence.
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@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
Yes, there are VARs lurking there, but there are also thousands of IT folks of all levels.
It isn't the VARs that generally take offense, once in a while, but rarely. VARs operate in a world like this very openly most of the time. It's the customers of the VARs that are the ones that take offence. The ones at all levels. Remember, the point of the article wasn't just that this "can happen", we talked about how this is the norm. So by expectation going in, if you post in an open forum of IT workers, the point of the article was that most of them will be to some degree involved in this system. So you should expect that most people who will respond will be upset for getting called out on something that they likely either feel very badly about or are scared that someone will discover.
I'm not stating anything after the fact, I'm pointing out what was to be expected from the beginning.
Right, I get that this certainly could be the case if what you are claiming is indeed the norm. I guess what it comes down to is like anything else: you should provide proof to backup your claims. Right now it's more or less just anecdotal evidence.
It's as simple as "talk to IT pros" on any scale and look at their work processes. It's so common that most people you talk to will assume it is "just how IT works" and "how else could it be done." The only question is "what percentage of the industry is it" and all I can tell you is that in decades of working with tons of people in these positions, it's so insanely common that it's almost all you ever find.
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@dustinb3403 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@scottalanmiller I didn't know your SAM-SD was using FreeNAS on detatched storage.
It wasn't, but lots of people used that. The original was CentOS. But FreeNAS was widely used by people doing their own SAM-SDs. And as you can see, lots of people found the whole concept very confusing and have associated a lot of things with it that never were.
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@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
@dave247 said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
I posted this over on the sysadmin subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8e4oli/is_there_really_a_var_kickback_system_that_it/
Not too many people agree with or like the post...
Well DUH, lol. They are the ones leveraging the system. Of course they will react passionately, that proves the point more than disproves it.
Wow. "They"? Reddit is a community just like this one. Just because it's not Mangolassi.it doesn't mean it should just be dismissed. Yes, there are VARs lurking there, but there are also thousands of IT folks of all levels.
I'm dismissing people who are reacting negatively to something that is really obvious and well known; not dismissing Reddit. That "most" people take offence to it is expected.
But Reddit is not like ML, ML is a pro tech community, Reddit is an open forum.
I thought ML was also an open forum too.. And I'm not talking about reddit as a whole, I'm talking about the sysadmin subreddit -- also a pro tech community.
I know nothing of official limits to the subreddit. Perhaps there are. ML is "on your honour" but is for IT pros (or those trying to become them) only. It's not audited and there is no policing. But Reddit itself is not filtered even "on your honor" and if the subreddit is, I'm not aware.
As a general thing, though, that subreddit is not seen as being very technical or professional. That's pure opinion, but one I hear from a lot of places. I definitely don't spend time there as it's not a good place for peer review, conversation, or advice within IT. It's a very different culture than you'd expect in peer situations.
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You can take the situation and flip it around... how often can you find an SMB that is not doing this model, at least partially. They exist, to be sure, but they are decently hard to find, it turns out. Now loads, and loads of people will claim that they don't do this and say that they use an MSP. But pressure them or investigate the MSP and almost always you find that the MSP isn't actually an MSP, but a VAR. Calling VARs MSPs is an extremely common way to cover this process. Sometimes they even pay them in an MSP capacity which does more to make it hard to identify.
Pick some totally random companies, try not to filter by some known factor like "they are really good at their IT" as that could potentially throw things off. But just do some investigation where you can. Dollars to donuts, if you really dig and pay attention, you'll find sales people running the show, at least partially, essentially everywhere.
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The thing that people often miss about this system, is that it doesn't require any coordination, planning, intent, conspiracy, or anything else that people like to look for. It's just human nature, self preservation, and normal sales. It happens in nearly every industry, IT is just bigger, broader, and more complex than most making it an easier target.
If we take the things that people say about businesses, especially SMBs, from management to IT, and just ponder them - it turns out that this system is exactly what you'd expect. Nothing surprising. Owners and CEOs of SMBs are often untrained, busy, and like to make the excuse that IT is tech and ignore it. IT people are often underpaid and undertrained - pressured to do things that they are not well prepared to do. But they are scared for their jobs because someone is always willing to come along and do things cheaper. CEOs and CFOs in the SMB can rarely put the numbers together to evaluate IT value, so shifting money from salary to purchasing often makes IT look like heroes, even when wasting money, due to financial reporting sloppiness. Then add sales people with mouths to feed and jobs to do.... it's all just as natural as can be.
It's easy to be upset or blame individuals or feel like it must be coordinated between all of these parties. But it really isn't, not 99% of the time. It's a system that is always at the ready and easily accessible.
And if you talk about it in any group for any length of time, you'll find people who are so confident in it that they will defend it and regularly say things like "how can we be expected to do anything else."
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Here is a really common way to spot this effect going on.
I was talking to the IT guy or my friend in IT and he had this project to do, so he called up three [vendors, resellors, salesman friends] to get quotes.
That's how you engage this process - leading with "sell me stuff" instead of leading with "determine if we need to buy something." The goal in that engagement is to spend money, not to meet a business need.
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@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
The goal in that engagement is to spend money, not to meet a business need.
and, via the nature of the process, have somebody do your job for you! Exactly like you've described above.
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@scottalanmiller said in The VAR Kickback System and How You Can Make a Good Living from Vendors:
Here is a really common way to spot this effect going on.
I was talking to the IT guy or my friend in IT and he had this project to do, so he called up three [vendors, resellors, salesman friends] to get quotes.
That's how you engage this process - leading with "sell me stuff" instead of leading with "determine if we need to buy something." The goal in that engagement is to spend money, not to meet a business need.
I would honestly say that in a case like this, the "IT guy" sees a need to purchase something (he may or may not know what he actually needs) and reaches out to his vendors to get pricing.
The case is subjective.
If my manager comes to me and says I want a new laptop, I can quickly lookup the age, model and other details of that laptop and then find a comparable but newer model to replace it.
In a case like that I might "just call my rep to quote out X".
Now the case you're describing is the IT guy who has no idea what the business needs, and just farms it out. Which is where I think a lot of people have a bone to pick with this topic as a whole.
