IT support gets treated as overhead. It's the line item that gets cut first and questioned most, because when it's working well there's nothing to point at. No incidents, no downtime, no crisis. Which reads as nothing happening.

The awkward thing is that's the whole job. You're paying for the absence of events.

I think about it like this. Every company runs on a set of assumptions nobody writes down. That the payroll system will be reachable on the 25th. That the person who left in March can't still get into the shared drive. That when a laptop dies the replacement gets set up the same way the old one was. None of those are automatic. Each one is somebody's job, and if it isn't somebody's job it just quietly stops being true.

Small companies feel this late. Things hold together on goodwill and one person who's good with computers for a while, and it genuinely works, until it doesn't. Usually the trigger is growth. Fifteen people is a group chat. Forty is a company, and at forty you can't remember who has access to what.

The other thing people underestimate is that IT support is where security actually lives. Not in the policy document. In whether offboarding happened on the right day, whether the endpoint agent is running, whether the person on the phone with a stranger claiming to be from IT knows that isn't how it works here. You can buy good tooling and still lose to a process nobody follows.

None of this makes for a compelling pitch, which is part of why it's undervalued. It's not a growth function. It's the reason the rest of the company gets to think about something else.