As a lowly help desk technician perusing this thread, you couldn't be any further from the truth. The software devs never open tickets, everyone else does and its for the most banal problems

My thoughts exactly. It's been a while since I last saw a company with an actual IT department and even longer where they had an actual clue. The reality is that IT in most SMEs simply sucks and no longer requires a college education. Working in IT for an SME is not a career plan. You're at constant risk of being outsourced and essentially all you do is done better by a gazillion companies as a service that probably cost less than a few months of your salary. Frankly, most SMEs would be better off doing exactly that. Most startups I work with do this from day one for obvious reasons.

Once you hit a certain scale different dynamics may kick in but even then, outsourcing is an option.

As a freelancer these days, I bring my own laptop and am granted access to stuff for the duration of the project. It's understood and expected of me that I do such things as encrypt disks, use 2FA, and don't use "secret" as the password. Most stuff I access for these projects is SAAS based. I'd probably walk away from projects where that wasn't the case.

> Isn't IT something from the past?

No.

> I would expect people knowing how to use a computer and what they need to do their job.

Yes, but their job generally isn't maintaining the computer or it's supporting infrastructure (networks, shared servers, etc.) or, outside of dedicated programmers, programming the computer even as an incidental task. IT exists to do (or coordinate contracting out for) those things, and the last point—restricting programming to dedicated programmers, has pretty much monotonically increased since the 1980s, when incidental programming was both more common than now and frequently projected to become increasingly common (lots of people said all good jobs would require some.)

When MacOS borks itself in an update because the endpoint management software does something funky with partitions, I'd rather delegate that to a team that's handled three cases of that this week and get on with my job description than diagnose the exact steps to resolve a problem that'll often require access I don't have anyway.