March 20, 2026 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
March 20, 2026 at 1:01 pm
It's perhaps a bit cynical, but it also certainly seems to be true in many cases...
In IT, if everything is working smoothly and well, upper management is asking "what are we paying you for?" If things aren't working or arent't working well, upper management is asking "what are we paying you for?"
The "flashy" jobs, such as sales, or the "prevent massive lawsuits and jail time" such as accounting and legal and HR get all the "visibility" with management. IT in general tends to fall into the same bucket as building maintenance, you don't know it's there until something breaks.
But, at least in my case, I don't WANT to be in the limelight, I want to be able to quietly work on my projects, keep my systems running well, keep the cyber-security team happy by keeping the systems up-to-date, keep the application developers happy by keeping the systems available and helping them improve their queries' performance. As long as my supervisor and his supervisor are happy with my work, I'm not worried (much) about getting "atta boys" from higher up the corporate food chain.
March 20, 2026 at 2:27 pm
Appreciation can happen. On one occasion, after getting a fairly large project implemented one of the company owners called me to his office and told me to schedule a vacation to Hawaii for my self and my wife at company expense. Now for the scary part. I'm getting old, this was nearly fifty years ago and I can't recall his first name, but I still appreciate it!
Oh yeah, now I remember, his name was Chuck. I'm not sure if the other owners ever knew about this.
Rick
If you do a half-assed job of things, folks will ask 'why did this ass only do half the job?'
March 20, 2026 at 8:23 pm
Just to expand on your article a bit in terms of hidden heroes - pretty much all of IT is a "hidden hero". Without them, companies would suffer a lot more outages and breaches. But the IT team goes mostly unnoticed UNTIL something breaks that they manage. AD goes down and nobody can log in - someone is calling IT. But the years prior where they were maintaining the server hosting AD and upgrading it with minimal downtime (sometimes without downtime), nobody noticed. IT, like the DBA, only gets recognition when things hit the fan and then it is negative recognition. And after things are up and running happily again, everyone forgets about who worked the evenings and weekends to get it up. It is easy to offer recognition to departments that make the company money because money talks. IT and the DBA don't directly make the company money. They generally cost the company money. So upper management doesn't like to think about them and they quickly get forgotten except by those who get help from them. And even then, they are forgotten shortly after the help is received.
I'm sure there are other departments like that too, but I am just speaking from experience. If you aren't directly making money for the company, upper management doesn't likely know or care who you are or what you do until something breaks and you are unexpectedly costing the company money...
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
March 21, 2026 at 9:00 am
The whole world runs on hidden heroes in all endeavours. An awful lot of stuff works because someone quietly did a thankless task, sometimes in the face of hostility from those who should have supported them.
Some of the great innovations of the C20th were initially dismissed by officialdom
March 21, 2026 at 12:54 pm
David, thanks for the film pointer. We're retired and always looking for our entertainment.
I think early on I learned that much of our satisfaction for a job well done in IT has to come from within. At one time for eleven years I managed and was the lead tech for a 24 hour operation at a wholesale food distributor. I had to drive 20 miles in to work any time of night to fix things while the warehouse workers and drivers waited. I think I just wanted to prove to myself I could do it. But maybe I was also young and dumb.
Rick
If you do a half-assed job of things, folks will ask 'why did this ass only do half the job?'
March 23, 2026 at 10:15 pm
Glad some of you feel like hidden heroes. Even without acknowledgement, there's a lot of satisfaction to knowing you did good work.
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