Is Most IT Really Corrupt?
-
@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller Totally agree it's often really obvious in SMB, but to them it's not a question of whether there is theft or not even when they notice it, but whether the individual is worth losing over it. Enterprise minded people have this mistaken idea oftentimes that everyone is replaceable or interchangeable. SMBs don't have the luxury of such a silly notion, so when they detect theft they must weigh relative value where Enterprises often simply don't bother because they seem to think they don't have to.
SMBs definitely have that option. It's an illusion that the do not. SMBs need fewer resources and at a lower level so actually have more ability to replace. What's often approaching impossible for an enterprise might be trivial for an SMB. SMB needs are so often generic and interchangeable compared to enterprise. They have a big advantage here.
Wait, is he saying people in SMBs are not easy to replace? The MSP and SaaS industry continue to make that a less defendnable position.
I think so. But SMB is so easy to replace. There is a waiting line of out of work or looking for different work SMB people (all with experience) for every available position out there. No one lacks someone for an SMB position. And nearly anyone from the enterprise can do SMB work, might be a small learning curve, but most SMB is much easier than most enterprise work (always exceptions) so there is a pretty big pool available there, too. And if SMBs were willing to pay market rates, they could hire people out of MSPs, too.
Because SMBs have the lowest requirements for staff, they have the easiest time hiring. It just makes the least sense to do so.
-
@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
As far as underhanded or shady purchasing deals with kickbacks, I would agree that IT are pretty uniquely situated to participate in such practices far more so than the vast majority of fields. I'll also agree that SMBs get the short end of things in terms of quality personnel of course, because they don't have the scope of reach for talent recruitment, nor the vast resources that Enterprises typically do, so oftentimes the Enterprises will scoop up much of the best talent before SMBs ever get a chance. Such scenarios obviously would leave the SMBs with far less comparable or adequately capable talent to choose from, forcing them to have to make due with what they have left to select from. Ironically, the biggest issue with SMBs may well be Enterprises gobbling up much of the best talent, perhaps as much as the fact that SMBs may not be great businesses.
A huge issue with SMB's is they have far less robust hiring practices. SMB's tend to cheap out on background checks for criminal actions (and in some cases even hilariously waste money on drug tests for IT staff, while using the "budget" background check).
I saw an IT director wiretap a board meeting at a SMB once. The guy was a little off, but honestly, I blame management. They wanted to have an IT director slash custom software developer who worked 70 hour weeks with 1 week of vacation a year and they paid a farcical 100K with no variable comp. If you have such unrealistic compensation requirements, your only option is going to be getting someone who's an idiot or worse, has some "fun" quirks like ethics or mental health.
Or, quite often, is totally unqualified AND has some quirks. The two often go together.
-
@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
This was an interesting read. I had never really given any thought to corruption in IT beyond the faking it idea. I sure as heck wouldn't feel comfortable working somewhere and not knowing what I'm doing and not even making an effort to learn.
And yet, it's so common that people no longer even realize it is something to question!
As long as you know how to learn quickly this one is often over-rated. It's the guys who NEVER learn what their job is (20 years in, having the SE come in once a week and make changes to network for them in exchange for buying enterysys switches) where it's out of hand.
That's what we see so much of. People doing the same job for a decade and not knowing even the most basic things about their specific jobs or environments. Outsourcing everything to the point where their own job has no point - a secretary could do it in 30 minutes a week without needing any training. We find this a lot. People just cashing a paycheck when they've actually outsourced themselves but told no one.
-
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@storageninja I'm saying that if there were enough good MSPs, I would agree with you. But there simply aren't enough of them...
That's the thing about MSPs. It only takes one. Unlike employees where you need to find a miracle employee for every individual SMB, all SMBs can go to the same MSP. There are absolutely enough MSPs to more than fill any demand from customers. I know good MSPs, I know none that don't take on more work. In theory some might refuse, but in practice, it's not a problem.
This is a market flushed with good MSPs and essentially no SMBs looking for them.
-
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
SMBs can't replace people as easily as Enterprises, because most of the best talent is gone before they can get to them.
The market doesn't agree. SMB people are everywhere. I can find you many decent ones at any given moment. Enterprise people no such luck. Enterprises cannot hire for anything. That's why they pay more and more stealing people from each other.
Enterprises go years without being able to fill positions. SMBs never need to go over a week. Any delay for an SMB hiring taking more than a week is a process problem on the SMB side. And, of course, SMBs have those problems in spades - total lack of how to hire talented people goes part and parcel with other SMB management problems. But that has nothing to do with SMBs lacking options, it's just them not taking them.
-
@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@storageninja said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
or a lot of standing around with not so trustworthy clients in their offices where their purses, phones, etc. are. I don't know if any of you deal with the public a lot or not, but our clientele are not to be trusted, as they have stolen from many of our employees before
I like central print servers where you walk up, enter your code, then it dumps the print queue for what you had queued (on some crazy fast printer). You can do secure printing in a central manner this way while still maintaining compliance. It also has the benefit of they can pick up their print jobs from ANY office.
your quote is broken again, I didn't say that.
This better?
-
https://i.imgur.com/ddT4ywV.png
I'm not sure what's happening to your quotes, this as shown, this indicates that I said this, and I didn't, That was tirendir.
-
@scottalanmiller I think what we're really pointing at is that SMBs settle when it comes to staffing, a LOT. Enterprises often don't settle until they feel they have to, because they can afford to do so while SMBs I believe more frequently cannot. It's much easier to leave a position unfilled because of a specialized need when you have 2000 employees and we're talking 0.05% of your staffing unfilled in comparison to an SMB with 20 or 50 employees who is leaving between 2%-5% of their entire staffing empty. Scale mitigates the issues of leaving 0.05% of your workforce unoccupied, specialized need or not. Also, Enterprises will typically have the resources to pay someone else to do the job until they can fill it the way they prefer, or even still they may not even need it badly enough to do anything about it at all in a very immediate sense.
Just because SMBs hire a lot of people quickly doesn't mean that's a good thing, and I think we both agree upon that. SMBs take a far greater hit for not doing so than Enterprises whose scale mitigates the issue dramatically in comparison. As we've brought up earlier in this thread, just because there are people doesn't mean but a very small handful of them are actually good people for IT roles. SMBs lack the resources and as you point out, and also frequently the understanding about the value of good IT to ultimately pay them what they could be worth. So the good ones often move on quickly unless they find an SMB that affords an abnormally good workplace.
I would argue that SMBs struggling to hire talent may or may not be due to a process problem, as I would point out that a great many SMBs have no HR or hiring department at all. They usually can't afford such a luxury unless they farm those things out to a contractor. Then once again, they are kind of at the mercy of the skill and talent of said contractor. I would posit that a big part of the problem is that it takes a talented individual to size up another talented individual well. Numerically, the odds are against SMBs having the personnel required to do such things well in most cases. Sure anyone can spot talent, but figuring out how much talent they have will likely require at least a similar level of talent. Would you agree?
-
For the record, I'm not necessarily saying that SMBs are great and Enterprises are evil or anything absurd like that. I'm just more focused on the concept that operating SMBs well is difficult for a variety of reasons that are likely more complicated than just poor decision making (although that's definitely a much greater factor than in Enterprise, and probably the single biggest and easiest issue to point out). My take is essentially that everything about SMBs success or failure boils down to every decision having a far greater impact in SMB than it has in Enterprise, because the greater the scale, the more scale mitigates the impact of every decision. In my mind, it's a minor miracle when almost any SMB manages to successfully grow to Enterprise scale because it's immensely easier to fail as an SMB than it is to grow to out of the SMB space.
-
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller I think what we're really pointing at is that SMBs settle when it comes to staffing, a LOT. Enterprises often don't settle until they feel they have to, because they can afford to do so while SMBs I believe more frequently cannot.
This is true to some degree. SMBs settle because they want to, however. SMBs have access to the MSP/ITSP market that Enterprises realistically do not. There are more resources available to the SMB market than the SMB market is willing to utilize - sure if all SMBs decided to hire well they'd be screwed, but they just don't bother leaving loads of good talent wasted whether individual or *SP oriented.
Enterprises rarely leave the good people on the market, someone snaps them up quickly. But SMBs decide to forego good hiring the majority of the time. Any SMB that wants good people can get them pretty easily. So while they might decide to settle, it's not because they have to.
-
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
It's much easier to leave a position unfilled because of a specialized need when you have 2000 employees and we're talking 0.05% of your staffing unfilled in comparison to an SMB with 20 or 50 employees who is leaving between 2%-5% of their entire staffing empty. Scale mitigates the issues of leaving 0.05% of your workforce unoccupied, specialized need or not. Also, Enterprises will typically have the resources to pay someone else to do the job until they can fill it the way they prefer, or even still they may not even need it badly enough to do anything about it at all in a very immediate sense.
True, which is just a good way of saying that MSPs / ITSPs are critical in the SMB because they fix this problem there.
-
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
I would argue that SMBs struggling to hire talent may or may not be due to a process problem, as I would point out that a great many SMBs have no HR or hiring department at all.
HR has no value in hiring processes. The CEO's job #1 is hiring good staff. No matter how many departments you have, you have a person whose role it is to hire the other people. No company is missing that. They might not do their job well, but there is no one to blame except for the CEO as that is their first and most critical job.
-
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
I would argue that SMBs struggling to hire talent may or may not be due to a process problem, as I would point out that a great many SMBs have no HR or hiring department at all. They usually can't afford such a luxury unless they farm those things out to a contractor. Then once again, they are kind of at the mercy of the skill and talent of said contractor. I would posit that a big part of the problem is that it takes a talented individual to size up another talented individual well. Numerically, the odds are against SMBs having the personnel required to do such things well in most cases. Sure anyone can spot talent, but figuring out how much talent they have will likely require at least a similar level of talent. Would you agree?
I totally agree. And, again, though these are services that are specifically and naturally handled by your service provider. These are problems that only plague SMBs that have the hubris to think that they can take the IT department at an impossibly small scale and run it without internal IT expertise. The MSP / ITSP model solves all of these intrinsic problems in the SMB space. This is all explaining in detail why I say all SMBs need *SPs.
-
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
For the record, I'm not necessarily saying that SMBs are great and Enterprises are evil or anything absurd like that. I'm just more focused on the concept that operating SMBs well is difficult for a variety of reasons that are likely more complicated than just poor decision making (although that's definitely a much greater factor than in Enterprise, and probably the single biggest and easiest issue to point out). My take is essentially that everything about SMBs success or failure boils down to every decision having a far greater impact in SMB than it has in Enterprise, because the greater the scale, the more scale mitigates the impact of every decision. In my mind, it's a minor miracle when almost any SMB manages to successfully grow to Enterprise scale because it's immensely easier to fail as an SMB than it is to grow to out of the SMB space.
I don't think that this is true. SMBs actually have it easy. That so many SMBs fail typically comes down to atrocious decision making for their business decisions. We see it every day, even decent SMBs do totally insane things that anyone on the outside looking in even casually can tell are bonkers. Spending way too much on one thing, never getting good advice, not following the most basic business principles, not spending money where it is obviously critical, etc. We look at SMBs every day and ask "how could any company making such bad decisions stay in business" and 80% of the time, they don't. But not because being an SMB was hard - we observed them being terrible at what they were doing and should have expected them to fail.
What's actually amazing is how many survive considering the kinds of decisions being bad over and over again.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller I think what we're really pointing at is that SMBs settle when it comes to staffing, a LOT. Enterprises often don't settle until they feel they have to, because they can afford to do so while SMBs I believe more frequently cannot.
This is true to some degree. SMBs settle because they want to, however. SMBs have access to the MSP/ITSP market that Enterprises realistically do not. There are more resources available to the SMB market than the SMB market is willing to utilize - sure if all SMBs decided to hire well they'd be screwed, but they just don't bother leaving loads of good talent wasted whether individual or *SP oriented.
Enterprises rarely leave the good people on the market, someone snaps them up quickly. But SMBs decide to forego good hiring the majority of the time. Any SMB that wants good people can get them pretty easily. So while they might decide to settle, it's not because they have to.
I assume that Scott specifically means to terms of compensation - if the SMB wanted a good highly qualified person, they'd simply have to offer the compensation to make someone want to work there.
-
@scottalanmiller I'm not arguing that SMBs don't make poor decisions, but that poor decisions have immensely greater impact in SMBs than they do in Enterprises. I don't think it's necessarily too outrageous to claim that many Enterprises make colossal blunders too, but most survive many such blunders and generally make less of them, in part due to the mitigating effects of scale that simply don't exist for SMBs. Enterprises naturally should and generally do make less poor decisions than SMBs, I completely agree! However part of the likely reason is once again because of scale. It's far easier to avoid lousy decisions with a lot more perspectives on a situation, a phenomenon that is relatively rare in the SMB space (I am referring to general terms, not IT-specific, as that's really just one of many examples where SMBs suffer from poor decisions).
In terms of compensation, I agree, SMBs tend to understand what the ownership/leadership understand. If role X isn't one of those things, they're probably going to make poor decisions in regards to hiring anyone for such things whether they opt for MSP, Internal-IT, or whatever else when we are talking about IT. How are SMBs whose problem is lacking good advice, supposed to be able to tell the difference between good and poor advice in fields they have no real practical knowledge in or of? How would you say good MSPs should be solving that problem, since any MSP can spout off numbers, point at satisfaction rates, and still be pretty terrible while looking impressive to the uninformed on such matters?
-
@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@scottalanmiller I think what we're really pointing at is that SMBs settle when it comes to staffing, a LOT. Enterprises often don't settle until they feel they have to, because they can afford to do so while SMBs I believe more frequently cannot.
This is true to some degree. SMBs settle because they want to, however. SMBs have access to the MSP/ITSP market that Enterprises realistically do not. There are more resources available to the SMB market than the SMB market is willing to utilize - sure if all SMBs decided to hire well they'd be screwed, but they just don't bother leaving loads of good talent wasted whether individual or *SP oriented.
Enterprises rarely leave the good people on the market, someone snaps them up quickly. But SMBs decide to forego good hiring the majority of the time. Any SMB that wants good people can get them pretty easily. So while they might decide to settle, it's not because they have to.
I assume that Scott specifically means to terms of compensation - if the SMB wanted a good highly qualified person, they'd simply have to offer the compensation to make someone want to work there.
Well maybe, but also soft benefits. Lots of SMBs struggle because of location. I know people making amazing salaries that will likely quit their jobs almost exclusively because of the location. Company is great, people are great, vacation plan is good, health benefits are good, money is great... but the location is... drab.
SMBs often struggle to offer desired locations and tend to fail to offer vacation, health and work from home benefits that enterprises often offer. And travel is nearly unheard of.
SMBs could do all these kinds of things and get anyone that they wanted out of the enterprise (almost). The one big barrier that they can't overcome is that they rarely offer interesting problems. SMBs tend to be extremely "cookie cutter" through no fault of their own and this can make them less enticing for people seeking a challenge.
-
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
How would you say good MSPs should be solving that problem, since any MSP can spout off numbers, point at satisfaction rates, and still be pretty terrible while looking impressive to the uninformed on such matters?
I've never seen this problem in the real world. Good and bad MSPs are pretty easy to tell apart. And not with technical knowledge, but with standard common sense and business knowledge. It's not perfect, but it's pretty effective. Knowing when MSPs present information well, don't sell solutions and hide being a vendor rep, have long term strategies, talk intelligently about the business needs, investigate business needs, act as a partner, etc. is really easy to see. If SMBs were filtering MSPs on these basic "anyone can do it, no tech needed" factors and still had issues finding MSPs, then we could talk about the difficulties of filtering further. But in the real world, it's pretty trivial to filter out the bad MSPs.
-
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
...since any MSP can spout off numbers, point at satisfaction rates, and still be pretty terrible while looking impressive to the uninformed on such matters?
None of those things should be impressive. That's part of the trick
-
@scottalanmiller I must have really lucked out with a killer good SMB then, as I get all of the above benefits you mentioned including some paid travel (once, maybe twice a year atm), excepting work from home benefits. That may materialize in the next year or so anyway when my organization may well absorb another organization that is essentially just like mine in a neighboring county that would require us to become a multi-location organization, thereby forcing some de-centralization to occur. My one big gripe with our current Executive is that the he is very anti-remote access for some reason.
I suppose one of the issues I've experienced with vetting MSPs is that I've not run into many SMBs that weren't technology-savvy who even knew what the difference between an MSP, a VAR, and a vendor rep were about as often as not. However, I will say that the acting as a partner versus a vendor, service provider, or a supplier has been very noticeable in the MSPs I've talked with, as most of the MSPs I've talked with seem to be all about what they can do for us instead of what we actually need or want them to do for instance. You know, marketing BS instead of just trying to do their jobs and sell us what we want/need, lol. It all sounded impressive to the others in management, as they didn't know enough to know why the marketing was just BS. We do have an MSP who while we really don't like the MSPs owner, we like the folks actually working there, as they have/do partner with us to back me up and offer real value.
