Every Saturday morning, I run with people who are building things.
Actual startups. Venture-backed, AI-powered, hacker-house-living builders. The kind of people you read about on TechCrunch.
I’ve been doing it for over a year, and I still haven’t quite shaken the feeling that I’m the odd one out.
Most of the group lives inside the startup ecosystem. VCs, deep tech angels, people building genuinely well-funded companies. Not just side projects with a landing page. Real founders with real backing.
And then there’s me. Pretty sure I’m the only one there who does “IT” and not “tech”.
Safe to say, I’m probably the least interesting person there.
For a while, I leaned into it as a bit of self-deprecating humour. “Yeah, I’m just the IT guy.” With a shrug and a slightly awkward laugh. But after enough coffees, enough conversations where someone asks what you do and you watch their eyes glaze the moment you say network infrastructure, you start to wonder if they’re right.
Then something changed.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened. Maybe it was the third or fourth conversation where someone was pitching their AI-powered tool, and I found myself thinking about what it actually takes to run it. The compute. The data centre. The network underneath that handles the traffic at the scale the big providers push.
All this innovation is amazing. But who’s building the foundations that make it possible?
It’s us. The infrastructure engineers. The unglamorous side of tech. The commodity layer no one thinks about…until it breaks.
The people in that Saturday coffee circle are building some really impressive things. But every idea they pitch is built on something they’ll never have to think about.
AI can optimise our systems. It can’t own them. It doesn’t carry the institutional memory of every outage, every workaround, every shortcut that became production infrastructure.
Cloud computing was supposed to make engineers like me irrelevant. It didn’t. It just moved the line. The plumbing got more complex, not less.
AI is going to make it even more.
My career has mostly been in mid-market businesses. Not massive, not tiny. In that space, I’ve never once been just “the firewall guy.” My title might have said Network Engineer, but I’ve worked every layer of the stack. Physical layer to application behaviour. Virtualisation, security, how the business actually operates day to day.
You become a generalist whether you like it or not. And that generalism is worth something. When you touch everything, you start to see how the cogs actually connect. You develop a kind of systems-thinking that’s hard to teach and easy to undervalue.
It’s also what leads to becoming an architect. Not because you got a certification or read the right book, but because you spent years subconsciously tracking how every change you made rippled into something else. You start walking into a room and quietly accounting for the user experience before anyone asks you to.
Infrastructure engineering doesn’t have a hype cycle. The conferences aren’t as buzzy, the LinkedIn posts don’t go viral, and most of the innovation happens in places the general public will never hear about.
And if you’ve been in this long enough, you’ll feel that. You know exactly how much depends on you. You know what breaks when you’re not there. You’ve probably held entire businesses together during incidents that nobody outside your team ever fully understood.
And you still walked into the all hands on Monday feeling like the least interesting person in the room.
That gap, between what you actually do and what gets noticed, is real. Backing yourself matters. But it only gets you so far if the work itself isn’t visible in a way the business understands. That part is fixable. Nobody ever taught us how.
Because the founders in my Saturday morning run group? Their ideas only reach a user because someone like you made sure there was a path for them to travel on.
That’s not a supporting role.
The question is whether you’re going to keep letting it go unnoticed.
We rarely think about how those things work behind the stage of a UI unless things stop working the way they were supposed to. Like with the news, a forest fire stops due to some rain but that is not announced in the news at all.