Nobody Thinks About the Roads
I have a type when it comes to jobs.
I don’t mean to. It isn’t something I planned. But if you look back across my career, a pattern emerges: I walk into companies that are struggling. Downtime they can’t explain. Security incidents they didn’t see coming. Compliance programs that exist only in the sense that someone once mentioned they should probably have one. Infrastructure held together with expired warranties and crossed fingers.
I come in, assess what’s broken, fix it, and watch the metrics improve. Uptime goes up. Incidents go down. The graphs tell a clear story, and for a while — usually six to nine months — I’m something close to a hero.
And then something shifts.
It starts quietly. The scheduled coffee breaks people took during that window every afternoon when the network slowed to a crawl — people stop remembering why those existed. The daily frustrations that were so familiar they’d become part of the rhythm of the workday fade from memory. Things just… work. And when things just work, a question starts forming in the back of people’s minds, whispered at first in hushed tones between colleagues:
“What do those IT people actually do here?”
The smart answer — the one that usually gets a laugh — is: “We need somebody to play video games.”
I’ve heard it more times than I can count. But the place where I heard it most memorably was at a think tank.
The Company That Helped Other People Think
A think tank, if you haven’t worked at one, is a company you hire when you need to do a thing but have absolutely no idea how to even begin doing it. You show up with a problem — or sometimes just an ambition — and a team of very smart people figures out the starting point, builds a path, and gets you moving. Contracts typically ran about six months. Six months to crack something the client couldn’t crack on their own.
The irony of what I’m about to tell you is not lost on me.
From an IT perspective, a six month contract cycle meant constant retooling and relentless pressure. If the design team had six months to solve an impossible problem, losing a single day to “the servers are down” wasn’t an inconvenience — it was a crisis. And unlike most organizations, where the technology stack is relatively stable, this place changed everything constantly. Every project brought different requirements, different hardware, different software, different infrastructure demands.
I want to give you a sense of what that actually looked like in practice.
One week we needed reliable wireless coverage in every corner of the parking lot — because the client was demoing high tech laser tag and the experience fell apart if the signal dropped. The next project involved wiring up a full size harvester that was, for reasons I won’t pretend to fully understand, sitting inside our office building. After that, we were building a high speed, no latency data connection capable of handling a 26 terabyte drop for an airborne demonstration.
A harvester. In the office. I want to make sure that landed.
Every one of those projects required the IT team to figure something out that had never been done before, under time pressure, with no margin for error, so that someone else could walk into a room and have a successful demo. We were not in the background. We were the foundation. Without the infrastructure working perfectly, the laser tag didn’t work, the harvester didn’t work, the airborne demo didn’t work.
None of that was visible to the people walking into those demos.
The Forgetting
The thing about infrastructure is that when it works, it disappears.
I had walked into that company the same way I always do — during a period of genuine struggle. Downtime. Printing problems. No compliance program to speak of. An IT team that had clearly been treated as an afterthought for long enough that they’d started to believe it themselves. We fixed it. The metrics improved. The graphs told the story.
And then the forgetting began.
It always starts the same way. The hushed conversations. The raised eyebrows in meetings. The casual remarks that carry just enough plausible deniability to never be directly confronted. What do those IT people even do here? The implication being: not much. The further implication being: maybe we’re overpaying for not much.
At this particular company, the prevailing theory — delivered with a laugh, usually — was that the IT team was there to play video games.
What made it funny, if you can call it that, was the timeline.
The comment would be made on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, the same person who made it would be standing in the IT area asking us to build out a high spec computer for an upcoming project. By the following week they’d be back, this time with a hard drive that wasn’t working and a deadline that was. The request would be urgent. The tone would be collegial. The irony would go completely unacknowledged.
And then review time would come around.
And the overwhelming sentiment, captured in feedback and discussed in rooms I wasn’t invited to, would circle back to the same question: did we really need this team? Were we sure we couldn’t get by with less?
The Roads and Bridges
Think about your commute this morning.
Not the traffic — the infrastructure. The roads themselves. The bridges you crossed. The traffic lights that sequenced in a way that kept things moving. The lane markings, the signage, the drainage that meant the road wasn’t flooded despite last night’s rain.
You didn’t think about any of it. You thought about your coffee, your meeting, your to-do list. The infrastructure was invisible because it was working.
Now think about the last time you hit a pothole. Not a small one — a real one, the kind that makes you check your tire before you pull back onto the road. Suddenly you are very aware of infrastructure. Suddenly you have opinions about the people responsible for maintaining it, and those opinions are not generous.
The people who fill the potholes don’t get credit for the smooth roads. They only become visible when something goes wrong. And when something goes wrong, visibility is not the same as appreciation.
IT is the roads and bridges of your organization. When the network is running, the servers are up, the data is flowing, and the wireless reaches every corner of the parking lot — including the corner where the laser tag demo is happening — nobody thinks about the people who made that possible. The work is invisible because the work is successful. And invisible gets confused with unnecessary.
I have watched this happen at company after company. The crisis that prompted the hire fades from memory. The improvements become the baseline. The baseline becomes the expectation. The expectation becomes: well, surely this would have happened anyway.
It would not have happened anyway. That’s the whole point.
The Permanent Cognitive Dissonance
At the think tank, the gap between what the IT team was asked to do and the credit it received for doing it never closed. The same people who questioned whether we needed to be there would be back the next day needing something that, without us, simply would not have been possible.
Nobody ever connected those two things. Nobody ever stood up in a review and said: remember the time we had to wire a harvester in the office in 48 hours? Remember the airborne demo? Remember when the laser tag worked perfectly in front of the client because someone spent the previous night mapping wireless coverage across an entire parking lot?
I’m not there anymore. But I’d be willing to bet the cognitive dissonance is still running. Unchanged. Unexamined.
Probably still does, even though I’m long gone.
What I Want You to Take From This
I’m not writing this to complain. I made my peace with the way this works a long time ago. The nature of infrastructure is invisibility, and the nature of invisibility is that it doesn’t get thanked.
But if you’re a business owner or a leader reading this, I want to ask you something directly.
When is the last time something in your IT environment failed? If the answer is “a while ago” or “I can’t really remember,” I want you to sit with what that means. It doesn’t mean you don’t need IT. It means IT is working. It means someone, somewhere, is filling the potholes before they become craters. It means the roads are smooth and the lights are green and your people are getting where they need to go without thinking about why.
The moment you cut the road maintenance budget is not the moment the roads fall apart. That comes later. And when it does, it comes fast, and it comes expensive, and it comes at the worst possible time.
The IT team that looks like it’s doing nothing is almost certainly the IT team that’s doing everything right.
Don’t wait for the pothole.
