We have have a vendor at work whose products we have used for a long time. We've had a fairly good relationship with the vendor, I suppose, and two of us on my team know one of the products absolutely inside and out. The other guy knows a related product just as well also. From time to time we have helped the vendor out as a reference client, talking to other potential clients about our environment, deployment, and the benefits gained. We primarily used the product to help manage a mix environment, when we had all kinds of Unix and Linux machines on the floor. These days we have one Operating System we use the product for, and we think we can replace the product with native tools. Our department pays quite a bit of money for the product, and a replacement would save a bundle. I am targeting being done by the end of the year.
The vendor has a guy that started being the rep for this product something like 6 years ago. A couple of years ago he was promoted to being the rep in the Mountain West, and then I think the entire West. We last talked to him about six months ago, they had another reference client call that they wanted help with. He called last week, and wanted to visit with us again. I assumed it would be another reference client he wanted to see if we could talk to, and planned to break the news to him that we were moving off the product.
It turned out that he has been promoted again, and he is a company VP over the product. Good for him. He also told us that the product had finally been the top performer in the company for the first time ever, and his people were busier than they had ever been. He had 12 positions opened for Senior Architects and wanted to know if we wanted the job.
We had upgraded the two products in question from one version to another a few years ago. He had heard it from our sales rep and didn't believe it at first, because the two versions were fairly different from each other, and they hadn't to that point had any customers worldwide that had done the upgrade by themselves. To that point, everyone had engaged with the company for professional services to get the upgrade done. It wasn't too terribly hard for us, since we understood the products so well, and understood our environment so well...
Anyway, I think if we had said yes, he would have had us on a plane next week to help a customer design their deployment. (This is what Senior Architects do, professional services to help design deployments, upgrades, and the like.) The job would involve quite a bit of travel, which I am not sure I am willing to do. I have a 30 minute commute to work if I walk. I try to avoid going more than 10 miles from my house, as much as possible. (I generally stay within about a 2 mile radius, really.) When Tara wanted to go to France, I bought her tickets out of Provo, instead of Salt Lake, so that I didn't have to drive up there and back to drop her off and pick her up. The small increase in ticket cost and the baggage fee was well worth the tradeoff. I would not be a good commuter. I assume I would suffer from road rage if I had to drive a significant distance to work on a regular basis. The idea of taking a job where I would have to fly all over the country fairly often doesn't really excite me.
The guy from the vendor tried to talk up the job. It would double my pay. He has a lot of day trips, and his wife travels with him a lot. The technical guys participate in the sales bonuses that come in. He had one guy that got a million dollars in bonuses last year as a technical guy, then he quit to go live on a beach somewhere. He said it could be a 'lifestyle changing' job. I could afford a nanny to take care of the kids while I traveled. (And on and on.)
I'm not sure I want to change my lifestyle. It's not a bad lifestyle. Our family is not starving. I work close to home. This summer I have been taking Thursdays off and taking the kids to the waterpark. We like living here. I like my job, it stays varied enough to keep me fully interested in the things we are doing, and in the next couple of years, we can see ourselves making some very interesting changes in our environment. I'm not sure going from client to client helping design their deployments of the product would keep me as interested in what was going on, it seems like it would be generally the same time after time. Also, it's not like I am anywhere close to the end of my career, and I'm not sure that working for a vendor is an incredibly stable idea. Sure, I could make a lot of money for four or five years, but then be tired of it and ready to move on. Or the company could be sold and gone, or carved into pieces. You never know.
With all other job offers I have had, I haven't had the feeling that it's time to go. There has always still been work to do here. I really like my job, and am really looking forward to some of the things we want to try to do here. At this point, I don't want to leave, and while the money would be nice, there are more important things than money...
Having said all that, the other guy is in a much different point in his life than I am. I could see him taking the offer, and doing really well with it...
Anyway, I am not taking this offer. The benefits really don't seem to outweigh the consequences.
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