[beeswax]

About a decade ago I was working for a smaller company that provided local IT services for a large SaaS provider which also enforced territorial protection by only allowing a number of certified service companies in the area.

95% of all field personell was only able to arrive at the client, sit down and grab a coffee to be talked through some items the first-level support was aware of, while I could actually fix most of the problems due to my deeper understanding of the underlying concepts of the stack (Windows Networking, DNS, SMB, LDAP, SQL, …) right away.

This was the problem: No other engineer was able to see through those things and of course the clients began to notice that I was able to help them way faster; with hourly billing and reduced downtimes this also meant way cheaper.

I was kindly asked to „take my time“ and to „relax, get a coffee first - go flirt with the female office staff“ so my colleagues would not look bad compared to me.

Shortly after I handed in my notice and went for a freelance gig which was the right decision for both the local market and me personally as well (I did not continue with the field service thing but got into custom software development).