Non-IT, but dealt with the range of them. I feel like QA is probably the most important job, but hear me out.

Developers achieve the objective. We’re living in their reality.

Designers make it useful, without them it would be an esoteric product.

Project managers take the reigns and keep things moving along. Without them, feature bloat and endless development cycles would occur.

QA is the one linking everything to the public. They seem superfluous, but they are the safeguard. Are they tedious? Yes. Are they a PITA? Also yes. But their objective is to ask a single question: “is this gonna come back to bite somebody in the ass?” Is probably the most important and they’re the first person who gets paid to think about it in any detail aside from the sys admin.

The sys admin, to be fair, is literally Neo from the matrix, left to stop every visible bullet left from QA (such that they’re visible bullets and not a wall of lead). They know the damage and triage the wounded, can’t blame them for being bitter about dealing with the wounded every day.

But we all know deep down that engineer that has the mentality, “how can we…” but doesn’t necessarily think through every possible way that we apes can mess things up. And to that effect, enough monkeys banging on typewriters for long enough, something is gonna go wrong.

Perspective from a biologist, so keep your salt unless you’re gonna bitch about your blots.