Even though the twitter-sphere gets really annoyed at this; I believe this is just about the distinction between a “software engineer” vs “software technician” in a sense. We don’t need to all be engineers but we do need to acknowledge the distinction and the need for it.
I really like the VendorOps title–when I worked at a healthcare software startup we would definitely interface with people at hospitals whose sole job was tending vendor software (including some hilarious arrangements where they’d be a full-time employee of a vendor rented to the hospital system but were basically hospital employees otherwise).
There’s no shame in this, and the work can be quite lucrative–until, you know, something changes and you end up like the SAP consultants who I had as Lyft drivers a couple years back.
It’s also maybe important to notice that these folks are usually maybe not 100% aligned with engineering for the needs of your org; a lot of VendorOps people are really just your internal AWS/Microsoft/whatever sales rep. This seems to be a very unacknowledged facet of the business.
Even though the twitter-sphere gets really annoyed at this; I believe this is just about the distinction between a “software engineer” vs “software technician” in a sense. We don’t need to all be engineers but we do need to acknowledge the distinction and the need for it.
I really like the VendorOps title–when I worked at a healthcare software startup we would definitely interface with people at hospitals whose sole job was tending vendor software (including some hilarious arrangements where they’d be a full-time employee of a vendor rented to the hospital system but were basically hospital employees otherwise).
There’s no shame in this, and the work can be quite lucrative–until, you know, something changes and you end up like the SAP consultants who I had as Lyft drivers a couple years back.
It’s also maybe important to notice that these folks are usually maybe not 100% aligned with engineering for the needs of your org; a lot of VendorOps people are really just your internal AWS/Microsoft/whatever sales rep. This seems to be a very unacknowledged facet of the business.