I was perusing social media the other day and came across someone writing about the mindset shift that broke them out of the break/fix mentality of IT. They could not have been more right, and it got me thinking about my own career and how I explain, to anyone who'll listen, how I got where I am.

It starts with something that has nothing to do with technology: be a decent human being and help people. Be present. Be accessible. As a leader, really be there for your team — know them, advocate for them, and never, ever forget how you got here. It's a whole mindset shift, and it has paid off in every job and contract I've had since.

Here's the technical half of it: almost every call you take, every meeting you're invited (or summoned) to, is you managing someone's personal crisis. It's not just closing tickets.

Simple to say out loud. Easy to forget in the moment.

When someone calls because they can't do something, they don't actually care what the fix is or why it broke. They just want the problem to go away. They didn't want to call you — you're the savior of their bad afternoon, like it or not. If a user can't log in to the VPN, you say, "I can help with that — let's get your password reset." You might think the problem was an expired password. The user will tell you the problem was that they couldn't log in. It doesn't matter which one of you is technically right.

Now add your boss. She wants X tickets closed per week — a standard metric — and there's a push to write knowledge base articles for end users. Over a few months you notice the same issue over and over. Passwords expire every 90 days, and like clockwork, every quarter the calendar serves up "password reset Friday."

You could just keep taking those calls and padding your numbers. (Which, by the way, is exactly why I don't believe in closure metrics — they breed half-baked fixes so someone can close a ticket.) Or you could write one genuinely good KB article and get it in front of people before they call:

  • Email the VPN users who haven't called yet, with the issue and the fix.
  • Add an auto-responder on certain keywords in the ticket queue that links the KB.
  • Drop a shortlink in the phone greeting: "Calling about VPN? Go here first."

"But my ticket counts!" Solve problems, not tickets. If those tactics work, the total volume drops — close 15 of 80 instead of 20 of 100 and you've held the same rate while quietly shrinking the problem. Start looking at total numbers across time, not just what you closed.

And here's the meta part: you're actually solving your boss's problem. She needs to know the team is pulling its weight — and now you're handling the same share with less volume and you've expanded into documentation and getting ahead of issues. (If a boss still only cares about raw ticket counts, that's your sign to look elsewhere. The job was never "close X tickets." It's "solve X problems.")

Keep that cycle going with a boss worth working for and you'll get handed bigger challenges — bigger problems, real projects. The breaking point comes when they decide you're more valuable solving one problem for a lot of people (one-to-many) than one problem for one person (one-to-one). And boom — you're not taking routine calls anymore. Nobody wants their best problem-solver resetting passwords.

I've watched this play out in every job I've had. Solve higher-order problems for more people — and more important people — and you'll keep moving. It really is that simple. It's just not that easy.