I co-founded Gremlin with Michael. I see the timesheets. I see the Slack messages at 11pm. I see Daniel online on a Saturday morning when nobody asked him to be. And I see the invoices we send to clients who have no idea any of that happened.
That is the thing about IT work. When it is done well, it is invisible. The systems are up. The email works. The backups ran. Nobody had to think about it. That is not the absence of effort. That is the result of it.
The work nobody sees
Michael spent a Saturday last month migrating a client’s database to a new instance. It had to happen outside business hours because the only safe window was when nobody was using the system. The change was planned, the project lead signed it off, the technical contact was in the loop. But the thirty people who opened their laptops on Monday morning to a noticeably faster system had no idea what went into making that happen. As far as they are concerned, it just got better on its own.
Daniel stays up past midnight sometimes chasing down a networking issue after a deployment. Not because someone asked him to, but because he noticed something odd in the monitoring and did not want to leave it until morning in case it got worse. Most of the time it turns out to be nothing. Sometimes it turns out to be the thing that would have taken the client’s system down at 9am. Either way, nobody sends a thank you email for the problems that did not happen.
The 2am alerts
Systems do not break on a schedule. Certificates expire. Cloud providers have outages. A disk fills up because a log file grew faster than anyone expected. These things happen at 2am, on bank holidays, during someone’s kid’s birthday party.
Michael has a phone that buzzes with monitoring alerts. When one goes off, he checks it. If it needs fixing, he fixes it. Sometimes that takes five minutes. Sometimes it takes three hours. The client wakes up, checks their app, everything is working. They have no idea it nearly was not.
This is normal. Anyone who has worked in IT has a version of this story. The job is not 9 to 5 because the systems you depend on do not know what time it is.
The stuff they do not charge for
I watch Michael and Daniel do things they were never asked to do. A quick scan of a client’s setup because something did not look right. A heads-up about a vulnerability that was in the news before the client even heard about it. Updating documentation on their own time because they know that if they get hit by a bus, someone else needs to be able to pick it up.
They keep dependencies updated, not because anyone requested it, but because outdated software is how you get breached. They test backups, not because it is on the task list this week, but because an untested backup is not a backup at all.
None of this appears on an invoice. It just happens, because they take the work seriously.
What happens when you lose your IT person
I have spoken to businesses that lost their only technical person and only then realised how much was being held together by that one individual. Passwords that only they knew. Monitoring that only they were watching. A server that only they understood how to restart when it got stuck.
The knowledge walks out the door with them. It takes months to recover, if you are lucky. If you are unlucky, something breaks before the replacement is up to speed and nobody knows how to fix it.
I am not asking for sympathy
IT people are generally not great at advocating for themselves. They fix things quietly and get noticed only when something goes wrong. That is the nature of the job.
But if you manage a business and your systems are running and your data is safe, someone is making that happen. It might be worth finding out who, and making sure they know you have noticed.