Consulting or Enterprise

mayhem87

Hello All,

Trying to get some thoughts on this as I am having a bit of a dilemma choosing between the two roles. Currently work as a consultant (delivery engineer) now and like any job there is pluses and minuses. Being a delivery engineer has led me to see some cool implementations but at the same time its almost to the point where a lot of what I do is just migrations.

I am afraid however, that if I go to Enterprise I will be bored as most of the customers I tend to deal with currently don't seem like they have a lot going on from a day to day perspective. My main attraction to Enterprise is getting to own it and being able to have the influence on networking decision instead of just going in, setting it up, and then away I go to rinse and repeat.

Has anyone done both? If so which did you prefer? Does Enterprise tend to lead to stagnation?

Thanks,

gespenstern

My 2 cents -- it tends. I worked as a consultant 2001-2013 and it was extremely fast paced. I learned a lot, but I was almost always traveling or in a rush completing a bunch of projects at once, worked on weekends all the time, worked on holidays, etc. I didn't have to for hanging on TE or other forums. I guess this work style works better for younger guys.

Then it so happened that somehow I transitioned to enterprise. And yes, it's slow, it's too dependent on approvals, you basically can't do anything even in test environment. All you do is meetings, coffee, lots of business english talking and MS Excel spreadsheets. It's really hard to do something real. Lots of technically incompetent people, lots of smooth talkers, various managers who just talk and talk endlessly.

In the end, if you want to stay relevant and be in demand if you decide to leave -- you'd better do your own mini-projects that don't require 100500 approvals and small researches, or do a homelab to learn something new.