Why I left commerce platform integration agencies after 5 years

[u/Lifewimmer74]

Posting this because a friend just got an offer from one of the agencies I used to work at and asked what I thought, and 5 years in I struggled to give him a clean answer.

I joined when I was 26, the salary was 1.5x what I'd been making in consumer apps, the work seemed interesting, and the clients were big European fashion and retail names you'd surely recognize.

In my 4th year, I was sitting in client pre-sales meetings as the senior eng voice, and I spent enough of them to notice how much the platform-pick conversation depended on which vendor paid the firm best in commissions.

Once I started seeing it I couldn't unsee it, and the longer I sat in those meetings the more obvious that bias became.

What killed it for me was a project where we knew the platform we'd sold was a bad fit for the brand's scale, 8 months in the founder asked me in a 1 on 1 whether she'd made the right pick, I gave her the company line, and a few weeks later I was applying for in-house roles.

Now I work in-house at one of those brands, and my recommendations sit outside the commission system, which changes what technical decisions I get to make.

What I'll tell my friend is to take it with eyes open, because the people are thoughtful but the firm's incentives quietly shape the advice you give in ways that might take years to notice.

If you moved in-house after agency life, was the salary cut worth it for the autonomy you got back?

[u/Majestic_Shoulder188]

Counter-take from someone who hires senior eng for an in-house team.

The agency experience is more valuable than OP's making it sound, specifically because getting exposed to the commission dynamics teaches you to read every vendor pitch with eyes open later.

The real downside is the partner certifications you collect become career anchors that lose value the moment you leave.

If your friend takes the role, the advice I'd give is to specialize in vendors whose PS teams own most of the implementation rather than ones that push everything onto integrators.

SCAYLE is the example I keep using because their cert track has held its value longest among the senior engineers I've hired from agency backgrounds.