stop working for large corpos and either work for small companies where you are actually integral or start your own business somehow otherwise feel the wrath of being a fucking number in a sea of numbers.
I've been pondering this recently.
I'm in my mid 50's. I feel I probably have one more "act" in my career to pull off somewhere. Right now I'm a pre-sales technical resource for a large cybersecurity vendor. The pay isn't bad, but the job is definitely becoming less and less my cup of tea. I've been in sales in general for coming up on 15 years now, and I'm of the "Be a technical evangelist while also cultivating solid relationships so you develop the trust of the executives and decision makers at the companies you sell to" model. Where I had a list of customers in my "patch" and my job was to go out, make them love me, our products, and buy shit.
They're shifting the whole sales model to where technical experts are now a "nationwide pooled resource". With the goal being you get tagged to drop in, give a demo, talk, pitch, workshop, then get out. You don't have consistency on what customers (or even what customer sizes, or geographies) it's literally "anybody in the US might be your next stop". I was explicitly told earlier this year "building customer relationships is no longer part of your job". This is not the gig I signed up for when I came on here. But it's where all the big players area heading. So heading to any of the other established players isn't really an option.
The alternative would be go to the reseller space, where I have a lot of friends, but the reseller channel is being destroyed because now AWS, GCP, and Azure are willing to be the reseller for a lot of other companies technologies and are willing to do it for 3% whereas traditional resellers HAVE to have around 8% gross profit on average to be profitable at all. So I believe the cybersecurity reseller world is in big trouble and probably about to evaporate. So I can't run there.
That leaves two options. Strike out on my own and do the consulting thing. I know I have the personality for it, but it still feels dauting to start doing that in my 50's. Or find a small startup and go be their "PT Barnum" technical showman, and we're in a consolidation phase in the cybersecurity industry right now so there are nowhere near as many compelling startups as there were a half a decade ago. Maybe AI will stir that up a little, but the major players are already jumping FAST into that space.
Goal at this point, find somewhere I can like what I do for another 5 years or so and call it a career at 60. Then be Haus who tinkers and crafts and sets up booths at the local arts and crafts fairs. Question is where can I pull off half a decade like that? Or should I just become a "part of the machine" where I'm at and just keep my head down and stay off radars....
