IT Pro Day Turns Five

Today is the 5th annual IT Pro Day, a day created by SolarWinds to recognize the IT pros who keep businesses up and running each and every day, all year long. Five years makes for a nice milestone, but in IT time it’s not. Many of you IT pros reading this likely support systems two or three times as old. As an IT pro myself, I know no one ever stops by your desk to say “thanks” for everything working as expected. That’s not the way the world works. I’ve never called to thank my cable company, for example. No, people only contact IT pros for one of two reasons: either something is broken, or something might become broken. And if it’s not something you know how to fix, you’ll still be expected to fix it, and fast. And thanks to the ever-connected world in which we live, IT pros are responding to calls for help at all hours of the day. Not just work calls either. Family and friends reach out to ask for help with various hardware and software requests. Just a few weeks ago I had to show a friend who was struggling with some data how to create a PivotTable in Excel while sitting around a fire. IT pros don’t do it for the money. We do it because it sparks joy to help others. Sure, the money helps bring home the bacon, but that’s not our end goal. We want what anyone wants: happy customers. And we make customers happy because we respond to alerts when called, we reduce risk by automating away repetitive tasks, and we fix things fast (and those fixes last, sometimes for years). Today is the day to say THANK YOU to the IT pro, and even give a #datahug to the ones who had enough time to shower before heading to the office. Cheers!