Broken Things. Human Reasons | Ep. 13

Twenty years ago, the IT professional's primary qualification was confidence. Nobody had the context to evaluate you. You showed up, tried a reboot, and if it worked, you were a genius. This is the episode where Jono Staff and Naran McClung look back honestly at how the job actually was, what changed, and where it is going.

About This Episode

A special edition with no guest. Two 20-year IT veterans reflecting on three distinct eras of the profession: the pre-SaaS field tech years, the cloud and SaaS shift that solved most of the old problems and created new ones, and the AI era that is moving faster than anything before it.

What This Episode Covers

• What IT work looked like before cloud, before SaaS, and before anyone had decent documentation

• Why confidence was the most valuable skill a field tech could have in the early 2000s

• The specific disasters that happen when test and production environments meet unexpectedly

• How the MSP job changed when SaaS arrived and made most of the old technical problems someone else's problem

• Why the modern IT professional has to be commercially fluent in a way that was never expected before

• The rising cost of SaaS and AI tools, and what it means for IT budgets

• Where AI agents and automation are taking the profession in the next five years

• A call for listener confessions: the outages, the cover-ups, and the tickets that got closed before they were really fixed

Why Now

AI is reshaping the IT profession faster than cloud did, but the context for understanding that shift is rarely discussed honestly. This conversation provides it: what the job has been, what changed at each inflection point, and why it matters now.

Who This Episode Is For

• IT professionals who built their careers before the cloud era and want to hear their experience reflected honestly

• MSP and managed service leaders thinking about how the profession is evolving

• CIOs and IT directors interested in a candid take on how the job has changed over two decades

• Anyone who has ever merged a test environment with production by accident

Leave your anonymous confession here: https://thingsreasons.show/confessions/

Listen to The Hyperscalers Are Winning. Are You? | Rant Cast #2 | Ep. 9: https://youtu.be/uJkewa9GYV4

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