In the case of my colleague he's expert-level in the software tools we need for our actual job, but he struggles with basic office tools like MS word and excel.

In a capitalist landscape we are trained to only ever be good at one thing. If you do more than one thing, you are worth less because then clearly youre not as good at your primary profession. Even if those other skills benefit that primary profession.

There are, of course, exceptions where managers understand that well-rounded employees provide a bulwark against mistakes and thus inefficiency. But for the most part, if youre not spending time on things that are not your primary responsibility, like learning tangential skills, youre losing them money.

These people have 0 usefulness outside of helping the guy print a pdf...

Until you click on a phishing link.

This is the curse of IT. Perpetually undervalued yet absolutely essential. If IT were ever to disappear, the businesses they support become walking corpses.

It chaps my ass that everyone working in business has grown up with computers being essential to business yet its somehow still acceptable for them to be functionally illiterate in using them.

Sometimes its so fucking bad that the equivalent would be someone being granted a drivers license and given a car but they have no idea how to put it in park, let alone use the brakes.

IT are the Dunedain Rangers protecting The Shire. They're not popular, they're barely acknowledged, often scorned, but without their presence The Shire cannot be.

This is like saying Software Developers have a useless skill set, except to make the important, value creating, end users more productive.