SMB vs Enterprise
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I've been lucky, I've been senior management in two Fortune 10s. Really gives a lot of great insight. I've worked for a lot of the Fortune 100, including a top 20 as my first job in 1989. I've done everything from a two man show to the biggest of their categories twice.
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I love both sides of things, SMB and enterprise. Two very different challenges. I'd hate to only have done one or the other. But if I had to choose, enterprise is the place to be. Especially as someone with a family. When my daughter was born, I was given unannounced, paid paternity leave for weeks. And when that was over I was sent home to work from home for a year to be with her. Not many SMBs doing that kind of stuff.
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@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
I love both sides of things, SMB and enterprise. Two very different challenges. I'd hate to only have done one or the other. But if I had to choose, enterprise is the place to be. Especially as someone with a family. When my daughter was born, I was given unannounced, paid paternity leave for weeks. And when that was over I was sent home to work from home for a year to be with her. Not many SMBs doing that kind of stuff.
I'd be surprised if that was the norm for the majority of enterprise companies, though. I really would.
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@dafyre said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
I love both sides of things, SMB and enterprise. Two very different challenges. I'd hate to only have done one or the other. But if I had to choose, enterprise is the place to be. Especially as someone with a family. When my daughter was born, I was given unannounced, paid paternity leave for weeks. And when that was over I was sent home to work from home for a year to be with her. Not many SMBs doing that kind of stuff.
I'd be surprised if that was the norm for the majority of enterprise companies, though. I really would.
That's a bit extreme, it was a great company. But not unlike the culture at the other two Fortune 20s I was at. All three would have been similar.
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@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
I love both sides of things, SMB and enterprise. Two very different challenges. I'd hate to only have done one or the other. But if I had to choose, enterprise is the place to be. Especially as someone with a family. When my daughter was born, I was given unannounced, paid paternity leave for weeks. And when that was over I was sent home to work from home for a year to be with her. Not many SMBs doing that kind of stuff.
Yes but it depends how high up on the totem pole you are in enterprise, too. If you were help desk in that company, I doubt they'd have done all that for you.
Otherwise yes I agree, both are good in their own ways.
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@Tim_G said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Tim_G said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@Tim_G said in SMB vs Enterprise:
Enterprise jobs seem to be more focused on a specific area, where SMB are more generalist type jobs.
In an enterprise job, your job may ONLY be working with Backup. Or it may ONLY be Group Policy.
Where as in an SMB, you will do it ALL, and then some.
Which also means that it is harder to be valuable in the SMB. Because you have to do work of many different levels, not just types. So you need the skills of ten enterprise seniors to do the job well of one generalist mid level.
This is why I prefer the generalist role more so than a focused role. First of all, it's way more fun to do it all... I enjoy being involved in all IT aspects. Also, being a generalistdoesn't mean you necessarily lack skill in an area. It means you are well versed and experienced in many areas, and are therefore able to innovate better.
I prefer it too. The issue is getting compensated for the skills, not acquiring them. How do you pay a generalist what they are worth if they don't have time to focus on high value tasks?
You do focus on high value tasks. You focus on multiple high value tasks simultaneously.
The problem is you also have to focus on low value ones, unless you have a full vertical stack of generalists. For example, your work designing storage systems is worth 10x while your work supporting a desktop application install might be worth 1x. Unless all your work is at 10x, any other work is a lower value than you are worth.
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@Tim_G said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
I love both sides of things, SMB and enterprise. Two very different challenges. I'd hate to only have done one or the other. But if I had to choose, enterprise is the place to be. Especially as someone with a family. When my daughter was born, I was given unannounced, paid paternity leave for weeks. And when that was over I was sent home to work from home for a year to be with her. Not many SMBs doing that kind of stuff.
Yes but it depends how high up on the totem pole you are in enterprise, too. If you were help desk in that company, I doubt they'd have done all that for you.
Well, mostly because of the physical component of that work. It's true, though, seniors get more options. But in the SMB, you might be the CIO and not get that flexibility.
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@Dashrender said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller said in SMB vs Enterprise:
ou are sick, the owner takes it as a personal affront when you are out dealing with family stuff, etc.
Huh - my personal experience has been literally the exact 180. The big companies bitched all the time about employees being gone for family stuff, the little ones while definitely more hamstrung, were more understanding.
So we talked offline and tracked down the company and its history and while the company in question has had a number of acquisitions and become a tiny enterprise today (~900 on the Fortune 1000 list) it was around 22% of that size (not 22% smaller, 22% of the total) back when he was there making it in the middle of the SME range. And an SME rooted solidly in Nebraska which makes it behave even smaller than it really is. So his experience there is more as we would expect from the SMB market and less from the enterprise because the company was closer to SMB than to enterprise back then.
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For reference, we tend to use the Fortune 1000 as a handy rule of thumb as to "what is enterprise", but it is hardly a hard and fast rule. These terms are always loose. Some companies act enterprise with 2,000 employees, some act small with 30,000 but there are trends. If you are an average company then the number of employees, needed skills and stock revenue of the F1000 tends to make you behave a certain way. But if you have loads of employees and not revenue, or vice versa weird things might happen if you use any one item as a guide.
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I've worked for both and haven't really noticed a difference. An enterpirse is generally broken up into much smaller semi-autonomous units that often operate similar to an SMB anyway.
Generally the biggest influence is your boss. If your boss is an asshole, it doesn't matter so much if he's an enterprise asshole or an SMB asshole.
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And for "most" people, in my experience anyway, SMB is 10-2,000 people plus behaviour. But IBM considered 500 the bottom of the SMB and 10,000 the top end (making IBM feel that Dash's experience was middle of the road SMB, not even SME.) SOHO is pretty broadly considered 1-10 people.
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@Carnival-Boy said in SMB vs Enterprise:
I've worked for both and haven't really noticed a difference. An enterpirse is generally broken up into much smaller semi-autonomous units that often operate similar to an SMB anyway.
I worked at one that broke things up like this, but they didn't feel or behave like SMBs at all. They were broken up to SMB size with maybe 200 - 500 employees per department. But still acted very enterprise, felt nothing like an SMB except for the communications domains.
All the other enterprises I've worked for didn't do that. I know some do. But at least in the US I think it is the less common approach. Especially with services like IT spanning many departments even if they are broken up otherwise (but not the one in my first case.)
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@scottalanmiller do you think it's easier to transition to a management role in SMB?
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@IRJ said in SMB vs Enterprise:
@scottalanmiller do you think it's easier to transition to a management role in SMB?
SMB management is pretty tame. I think it's much lower key, normally, especially as even CEO positions in an SMB tend to be quite junior to even entry level management in an enterprise.
SMB does have the challenges of little mentorship or established procedure. And more unknowns.
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I've only worked SMB. I'd like to try Enterprise some day but worry everything would be too impersonal. With SMB, some of them have been like a family. Real nice. I've worked some that were truly nasty though - I'd go SMB, but move until the right SMB is found.
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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.
I also like to be able to take charge and leave the parts that need specialists, to specialists.
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@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.
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@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...
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@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.
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I've lost count of how many specialists there are who are having a harder time finding work than the generalists.
20+ years doing absolutely nothing but Microsoft Exchange? In a world of Office 365 and Google Apps, your options are limited.
