Also, been there, done that:

A few years ago, I worked at a very small software vendor. We provided one software application for insurance claims. It was not complex and used nothing at all unusual. A web server and working DNS is all it took to get it going.

Nevertheless, I was often off the books tasked with fixing entire large company’s networking environments, DNS, Active Directory, virtualization environments and Citrix to make our small application work. And I know most of you who read this are not in IT, so this would be like having a plumber come around to fix a faucet and then have them do your interior decorating, tutor your kids on algebra, replace your alternator in your Buick, and also re-do your landscaping. It’s insane.

I did all this so our application could have an environment that worked well enough to allow it to function. Absolutely none of it should’ve been done by me, but many companies had such broke-ass environment that we had no choice (and my boss said to do whatever it took to get the application working, so I did).

One time my boss there asked me, “If they’d had to hire enough people to do what you did for them in their busted environment, how much would it have cost and how many people would it have been?”

I thought about it for a bit and told him — accurately — that it would’ve been 4-5 people and they’d have to pay those people total about $500,000 a year to do what I’d done.

There’s just so much incompetence in every field. It’s a shock anything gets done. But I truly do think a lot of it is ameliorated by people like me, working behind the scenes and off the books, fixing shit.