My short time at CDW UK (within solutions) was such a bizarre and unexpected experience.
Before joining (I was head hunted directly by senior management) I considered myself to be a well respected leader & influencer in my field. By the time I handed in my resignation, I felt the opposite - depressed, frustrated and anxious, with low self-esteem. I was lacking in confidence and I started to feel de-skilled and less relevant.
A few things I wish I had known before joining:
- Solutions at CDW is now just another sales team overlay, it wasn't the community of thriving technologists that I was lead to believe it was. A difficult to use, poorly adopted CRM platform is the primary measuring stick. As a solutions architect, you're measured on your CRM contribution, you could be Elon Musk, but if CRM says you are crap, then you are crap, and you will feel crap.
- It isn't very diverse (mostly white males).
- You're consistently measured against well established product supply driven solutions practices such as hybrid infrastructure (big hardware BOM's for customers) and Workspace (big Office 365 sales, very basic integration on the back of desktop & iPad sales etc). For someone that was meant to be innovating and iterating on a new line of tech, this was distracting, stressful, and over time it became depressing.
- Solutions had already mothballed a number of other new tech incubations. If I had known this was due to the same issues I had faced, I would have turned down the opportunity to join.
- The business as a whole is very vocal about promoting good mental health which is very encouraging but in practice it is very rarely followed. The solutions leadership teams will respond to e-mails late in the evening and in the early hours of the morning and promote stories of coworkers giving up their personal time to 'get this one over the line'.
- Practice leads are toxic about other solutions teams and the architects within them. Team meetings include a significant amount of toxic humour, personally I couldn't wait to get that out of my system.
- Nearly all of the most talented technologists have either left the company, moved out of solutions or are planning on leaving.
Generally speaking, I did get on very well with most of the other solutions architects (and sales in general). CDW is sales company, as long as you know that before joining you will probably enjoy it more than I did. If you go in there and try and get support on the adoption and sale of anything that doesn't related to product supply, then you're doomed to failure. If you are aligned to product supply, then you'll thrive.
I am grateful for the experience but I would never go back.
