I don’t know if it’s the best compliment I’ve ever received. The most recent one—and I’m being generous by calling it a compliment—came a couple of weeks ago. Someone told me: “You people in IT are a necessary evil.”

Instead of taking it as an insult, I chose to take it as a compliment. Our work is quiet and often underappreciated by most people in the company. Yet, they still recognize that we’re a part of the productive machinery that’s impossible to ignore. The IT team is a fundamental piece of the company’s mission and objectives.

I took that comment in a very constructive way. My work is genuinely valued. My team’s work is genuinely valued. People don’t always agree with our approaches. They also do not agree with the cold, precise way we sometimes communicate. That’s just the nature of the job. I have to be extremely exact when communicating with business owners and users. Otherwise, we risk our actions being misunderstood. The business make decisions without the information it needs.

So yes—IT people are a necessary evil. We study and prepare for it. Our experience makes us a necessary evil. If everyone loved us all the time, we probably wouldn’t be doing our job right. Because it’s only when things break that our work is remembered.