Work – hmm, this is a tough one to talk about. I am what is called a Sales Engineer, while I make decent money I don’t nearly meet the mid to high range figures on that website, but it is a great description of the job. I am also third level support for the company I work at and an Enterprise Project Manager. What does that mean? Well unlike what my wife says when people ask what I do, the answer is not ‘he works with computers’. =-)
Say you are a North American gold mining company, a major Travel Agency or a National employment sourcing company as examples(no names on a public blog) and you need to have a company host your web, mail, shared data, product/people databases in a secure Data Centre as well as manage your IT security and access to these devices you would come to my company. The sales rep would introduce me and I would work with the company to discover their needs and come up with a solution. This generally takes into account:
–Firewall needs
-Remote access requirements
-How many servers required? Do you want us to source them?
-Do you need cage space in our Data Centre?
-How will you access the servers? VPN? Trigabit encryption?
-What level of redundancy? Any Disaster Recovery plans?
-How much do you want us to manage server and network related?
-What are your applications and needs?
Once I work through everything I need, the solution is designed, priced and generally a plan for deployment is made. If the client signs I Shepard the process to completion and watch them during their time with us. On top of this as mentioned I support the entire company from a high level perspective as well as train and work on documentation and assorted projects.
It is a challenging job, just like any other company there is the occasionally political crap to deal with and people I will butt heads with, but it is rewarding, more money is always nice so we will see how that goes. 😉
To get to this role I had to battle in the trenches as a residential support tech (are you using dial up or dsl ma’am?), then corporate support, then high speed install and provisioning, then provisioning manager, then Sales Engineer. I am Cisco certified took a technical business course at a local college and am generally an inquisitive, hard working, determined and fairly intelligent self trained person.
That’s about it…goals you ask? Well I would like to move up the chain, become a national technical integrator for an organization or working for a company that supports fortune 100’s at a director/VP level…we’ll see.
Promise the next post will not be as boring…=-)
Serious/Gamer 