MSP vet here - you’re not wrong, they can have extremely sexist internal cultures.
But: a 20% raise is almost unheard of without having a counteroffer in hand. Someone there values you and wants to continue developing your skills.
The people I saw move up (or out) in MSPs typically did so through getting advanced certifications. If your employer is a verified Microsoft (or Cisco or VMware, or whoever) reseller, they will offer free training modules. The MSP, in return, will get better percentages on resale with more people in the company having these certs.
NGL, this sounds like churn with what you’ve written here.
I know no one wants to say “this thing costs money” but it doesn’t (usually) hurt to talk about it ahead of the next FY budgeting cycle.
If you have a process for Churn Risk: Red, I’d follow it now.
Customer Success is rarely an entry-level position. Most people in it have worked a variety of other roles within SaaS (support, sales, or implementation) OR have significant domain experience, in that they have been power users of a particular type of software.
If I were a recent grad, or recently post-internship, I’d look at more technical roles. It can only help your future prospects if the CSM market opens back up, or perhaps you find something else you’d rather be doing!
FWIW, I’ve been on the market for over a year post layoffs, have 10 years of experience including domain expertise, and have literally lost count of the number of auto rejections. Or number times I charmed a recruiter or a hiring manager only to get ghosted at a certain point. So many companies have laid off CSMs in the last 18 months, the field is absolutely flooded.
Philip Seymour Hoffman. He had such an amazing ability to depict love on screen, not to mention any of his myriad other talents.
Is it a large company (Fortune 100) or one in a highly regulated industry?
If yes, proceed with documenting & hiring an employment lawyer.
If no: Are you in the US, and in a right-to-work state? If there are locations in CA or WA, proceed with an employment lawyer, but be prepared that if it comes to the EEOC, they are not staffed for addressing the needs of the vast majority of harassment claims.
If no to both, find another job. I’m sorry this is happening to you.
Hah, my husband’s great-grandfather did the same thing, only with the imperial German navy in New York in 1910. I think it was pretty common!
I don’t disagree with any of your points, and would have full-throatedly agreed with you 10 years ago.
But my experience since then has made me wary of HR, wary of a lot of male colleagues, and wary of the fact that the only women I see in C-suites are either marketing or HR.
If you haven’t had an experience bad enough to start from a position of mistrust of men in the workplace, I’d consider that lucky. I was not prepared for the betrayal I experienced from men I thought would take a bullet for me.
I agree with creating the business case in theory, but MSPs are rarely known to fire clients in my experience, unless a consistent negative effective billing rate can be established.
I have asked to be taken off an account, software not services, and it actually worked out very well. The client POC was a POS (heh) and when asserting my boundaries backfired (in that case, redirecting from a tirade back to the agenda prompted an additional tirade!), I described the situation to my managers and said when there was additional CSM bandwidth available, that I wouldn’t mind getting rid of this client. My VP put my request to be removed to the client-side mgmt, which enabled them to see a pattern regarding That Guy and female colleagues. The renewed senior partnership made an expanded renewal possible, which wouldn’t have been the case with the earlier arrangement. There was no harm to my metrics, either.
Also, the way companies treat vendors/MSPs is fucking wild. If your company is within in compliance with contract or SLAs, and your manager has your back, shut that shit down. None of us get paid enough to get yelled at.
You are correct. HR is not there for the employees, and will engage in victim blaming and retribution if it gets the issue off their plate.
If you are not at a publicly traded company, or a company in a highly regulated industry (which tech is not) the understanding that any kind of harassment is illegal is basically fiction.
HR in smaller companies or less regulated industries will do as little as they can get away with, because there’s essentially no enforcement mechanism for punishing violations. The EEOC has no interest in small cases (even very clear cut instances of violation) due to persistent funding gaps and the increase of claims post-2017.
Knowing what I know now, post 2 different companies failing in this regard in different ways, I will never say anything to HR or management regarding harassment. Maybe in an exit interview, if I’d be so unfortunate to encounter this again, but those aren’t often done in my area.
Beirocks (also bierrocks, bierocks, runza) are great, and should be everywhere. It’s a yeast roll filled with ground beef, cabbage & onions. (I like to use rinsed sauerkraut for mine!) It’s less of a meat pie than it is a macro dumpling, I think.
They’re from the Volga Germans, the descendants of the German farmers invited by Catherine the Great to farm the Volga river valley. In the 19th century a large number of them emigrated to the southern Great Plains, bringing the beirock with them.
I grew up here, and even with my SPF loving, wrinkle avoidant mom, we never wore sunblock until after the school year was out. Maybe in May, if it was already hot & swimming was involved. (We are also lightly melanated, and tended not to burn).
In my head, that meant that sunburns and heat were correlated, which lead to the worst sunburn of my life on a 75 degree day at the Taste of Chicago.
I don’t usually wear sunblock on my body unless I’m planning on being outside for a while, and pretty much never btw October and March.
I remember watching the pre show and thinking, that is a winner’s dress!
Oh boy, do I have insights into this! A bunch of you have covered this wrt to business rationale, but here are the actions/circumstances that would make me brush up the resume & hit LinkedIn:
No new logos in 6 months (more company wide than CSM specific)
Having CSMs tracking time or worse, a metric shift to activities count - have never seen this go well for any non-technical CSMs that couldn’t easily shift into professional services/support.
A faraway look in your manager’s eyes in 1:1s, lol. This one might be only truly visible In retrospect, but if you are getting the vibe that this person is distancing themselves from you, pay attention to it.
I generally assume that people are a) reading emails on their phones and b) during meetings about something else, so I make sure to be very to-the-point at the beginning of the email.
In the case of instructions like that, I’d keep it punchy, and mention the detailed instructions below. Not sure how you get around the follow-up call, but that’s the mystery of human communication, I guess.
A friend of mine saw him at a Halloween party in Hollywood in the 80s. He was dressed as Jesus. She (very petite, like 5 feet) ran into him coming around a corner, looked up, and cracked, “Jesus Christ, you’re tall!” Which delighted him, according to the telling.
It made me better in some respects. After testing negative for celiac, my GI prescribed it for diarrhea to be followed with a low FODMAP diet for six weeks.
I was basically having diarrhea anytime I ate anything, which he attributed to a dysbiosis activating my MMC out of sync.
I did stop having diarrhea, but have since moved on to a raging case of IBS-C and have precancerous polyp development. (The polyps are likely genetic to some extent.)
Even with the current situation & symptoms, I would still absolutely do the Xifaxin + low FODMAP thing again if needed.
Joint pain & constipation are my NCGS symptoms. And like you, I’m not 100% gluten free. The joint pain seems to reflect gluten consumption over time, and is usually a sign to cut back/not eat flour tortillas, lol.
More that I wish I had picked a lane in something more consistent (and consistently defined) than CS earlier in my career.
I wouldn’t say that’s a typical CSM role in more established companies, but is congruent with my experience doing account management (before they called it CS!) at a startup back in the day.
If you want to take on this kind of role in the dev cycle, I would speak with the scrum master to get added to the daily standup, and go from there. There is definitely room for improvement (user testing in prod? Someone is being sloppy or has no idea how the product is used) and getting user feedback earlier in the process is kind of what Agile is all about.
This can be a path into more technical or product-oriented roles, which, as I’ve been laid off for the last year, I wish I’d pursued some kind of specialization more directly back then.
I have NCGS, for which my primary symptom is constipation. I take this if I have eaten gluten, and it works pretty well.
Late Gen X here - Buying a whole ass CD unheard, bc of good reviews! They weren’t cheap, either; in 1995 list price was usually 16.99.
Or buying a CD with only one song you liked. My general rule was to stick to soundtracks/compilations/best-ofs if I was buying a new CD.
Minimum wage was 5.15 or so, so a 16.99 CD represented a significant amount of money to a younger person.
My boomer mom thought I had it rough, as in her record-buying heyday, LPs and hourly minimum wage were approximately equivalent.
I have my grandfather’s (looted, I presume) Walther, along with the paperwork from the Army allowing him to bring it back to the States.
It appears that the Army received it & sent it home as part of the decommissioning process.
I found Supergas to have a really wide heel, so I’d try adhesive heel pads before buying more socks.
sneakers that aren’t sambas
fashionwomens35