[samirageb]

Some excellent points I hadn't mentioned in my reply in this thread. People often forget that keeping things up is a constant battle.

Your opening paragraph says it all though. When developers talk about how difficult programming is, I always explain IT like this:

"Imagine you have N sections of code you have to support that someone else has written. They may/may not be documented, whatever documentation you have may not even be accurate, you can't change the, and somehow they have to work together even though they probably weren't designed to do that. Oh and there's a good chance there's no one to call for integration help, but you're responsible for tactfully explaining this all to executives & end users without ticking them off, even though they'll only call you when it's broken."

It's too bad that the perception around IT's role has only gotten worse now with the cloud.

[ryall]

I'd like to add one more thing to your analogy:

"You know the 30-60 minute spin-up time it takes to get your head into coding? Well imagine someone interrupting you every 15 minutes to ask you how to insert a table into MS Word (I'm sorry, didn't your fucking CV say you had MS Office experience?). Now imagine how long your replies would remain welcoming and friendly."