The TL;DR: My team at Gartner has an open position for someone who has a strong understanding of cloud IaaS — someone who has experience architecting for the cloud, or who has worked on the vendor side of the market (product management, solutions architecture, engineering, consulting, etc.), or is an analyst at another firm covering a related topic. If you’re interested, please email me or contact me on LinkedIn.

The details:

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post on “Five reasons you should work at Gartner with me“, detailing the benefits of the analyst role. I followed it up last year with “Five more reasons to work at Gartner with me“, targeted at women. Both times we were hiring. And we’re continuing to hire right now.

We’re steadily expanding our coverage of cloud computing, which means that we have multiple openings. On my team, we’re looking for an analyst who can cover IaaS, and if you have a good understanding of cloud security, PaaS, and/or DevOps, that would be a plus. (The official posting is for a cloud security analyst, but we’re flexible on the skill set and the job itself, so don’t read too much into the job description.) This role can be entirely work-from-home, and you must work a US time zone schedule, which means candidates should be based in North America or South America.

Previously, I noted great reasons to work at Gartner:

1. It is an unbeatably interesting job for people who thrive on input.
2. You get to help people in bite-sized chunks.
3. You get to work with great colleagues.
4. Your work is self-directed.
5. We don’t do any pay-for-play.

In my follow-up post for women, I added the following reasons (which benefit men, too):

1. We have a lot of women in very senior, very visible roles, including in management.
2. The traits that might make a woman termed “too aggressive” are valued in analysts.
3. You are shielded from most misgyny in the tech world.
4. You will use both technical and non-technical skills, and have a real impact.
5. This is a flexible-hours, work-from-anywhere job.

I encourage you to go read those posts. Here, I’ll add a few more things about our culture. (If you’re working at another analyst firm or have considered another analyst firm in the past, you might find the below points to be of particular interest.)

1. People love their jobs. While some analysts decide after a year or two that this isn’t the life for them, the ones that stay, pretty much stay forever. Almost everyone is very engaged in their job, works hard, and tries to do the right thing. Although we’re a work-from-home culture, we nevertheless do a good job in establishing a strong corporate culture in which people collaborate remotely.

2. We have no hierarchy. We are an exceptionally flat organization. Every analyst has a team manager, but teams are largely HR reporting structures — a support system, by and large. To get work done, we form ad-hoc and informal groups of collaborators. We have internal research communities of interest, an open peer review process for all research, and freewheeling discussions without organization boundaries. That means more junior analysts are free to take on as much as they want to, and their voices are no less important than anyone else’s.

3. We have no hard-and-fast coverage boundaries. As long as you are meeting the needs of our clients, your coverage can shift as you see fit. Indeed, to be successful, your coverage should naturally evolve over time, as clients change their technology wants and needs. We have no “book of business” or “programs” or the like, which at other analyst firms sometimes encourage analysts to fiercely defend their turf; we actively discourage territoriality. Collaboration across topic boundaries is encouraged. We do have some formal vehicles for coverage — agendas and special reports among them — but these are open to anyone, regardless of the specific team they work on. (We do have product boundaries, but analysts can collaborate across these boundaries.)

4. We have good support systems. There are teams that manage calendaring and client contact, so analysts don’t have to deal with scheduling headaches (we just indicate when we’re available). Events run smoothly and attention is paid to making sure that analysts don’t have to worry about coordination issues. There’s admin and project manager support for things that generate a lot of administrative overhead or require coordination. Management, in the last few years, has paid active attention to things that help make analysts more productive.

5. Analysts do not have any sales responsibility. Analysts do not carry a “book of business” or any other form of direct tie to revenue. We don’t do any pay-for-play. Importantly, that means that you are never beholden to a vendor, nor do you have an incentive to tell a client anything less than the best advice you have to give. The sales team understands the rules (there are always a few bad apples, but Gartner tries very hard to ensure that analysts are not influenced by sales). Performance evaluations are based on metrics such as the popularity of our documents, and customer satisfaction scores across the different dimensions of things we do (inquiries, conference presentations, documents, and so on).

If this sounds like something that’s of interest to you, please get in touch!