Kacey van Hemert

She Had to Leave K-12 IT to Find Out She Loved It.

Kacey van Hemert met Pine Cove years before she ever worked there.

She was the on-site tech at DaVinci Academy in Utah, still finishing a degree in computer software engineering, when a guy named Kyle Thompson showed up from a company called Pine Cove Consulting. No pitch. No job offer. Just a name worth remembering. (DaVinci is a Pine Cove client today.)

Then she graduated and did the thing the degree pointed at. She went to work at a financial institution writing code. And almost immediately, she started missing something she hadn't realized she was attached to.

"I didn't realize how much I loved it until I had left it. And that's when I realized, crap, I actually want to get back to that."

So she emailed Kyle and asked if Pine Cove was hiring. They had a couple of openings. She applied. Two years later she's on the service team, eight years into a career in tech, and not planning on going anywhere.

A Mixed Bag, On Purpose

Officially, Kacey is on the service team. Unofficially, the job depends on the week.

Most of the time she's remote: a phone rings, a ticket lands, something's broken, and she goes and finds out why. But she's also the extra set of hands on site. She moved to Littleton, Colorado about a year ago, roughly twenty minutes south of Denver, which means anything in the state usually has her name on it. Switch installs. Network configuration. Real cable, real ladders, real buildings.

That work clusters in summer and over school breaks, for the obvious reason: you don't rip out a district's network in the middle of third period.

The Districts Nobody Else Drives To

Kacey has a lot of friends in tech. She hears what they say about working at very large companies, and the word that keeps coming up is unfulfilled.

She doesn't have that problem, and she's specific about why. A big share of Pine Cove's clients are schools, many of them in small and remote towns across the Rocky Mountain region. These are places where technical expertise doesn't just wander in.

"They care, they want things to work, they've got students, they've got staff that need support. They just don't have anybody who lives in those remote areas who can assist them."

Being the person who shows up for those districts is, in her words, the part of the job she finds really fulfilling.

The Company Without That One Guy

Every office has one. The person everybody talks about. The one you route around.

Pine Cove, Kacey says, doesn't have one.

"There's not one person that I don't feel comfortable turning to and saying, I need help, or how can I help you."

Some of that is scale. It's a small company, and the senior engineers are deep enough in their specialties that help is genuinely help. But she thinks a bigger piece of it traces back to how the place was built. Rick Vancleeve founded Pine Cove in 1993. His sons run it now. The family never left.

You feel it, she says, in the ordinary stuff. Asking for time off without bracing for it. Saying out loud that a project is stressing you out.

"I'm never scared to talk to my bosses about problems. I think it's because they really do approach it with, we want to take care of our company in the same way that we take care of our family."

From Crawling Into a Box to Not Blinking

Pine Cove doesn't formally run tier-one techs, because that's not really how an MSP works. But when Kacey was hired, junior is essentially what she was.

Two years later that's not the job she's doing, and the change wasn't accidental. The senior engineers make time. There are training paths. The company needed depth badly enough that there was room to grow into, and the only real requirement was wanting it.

"There are tickets I answer now that would have made me want to crawl into a box and cry when I very first started. Now they're just nothing."

Looking forward, she's watching for gaps. Pine Cove has people who are excellent at firewalls, servers, and networking, and they're all busy being excellent at firewalls, servers, and networking. Cloud is the space she keeps circling: Intune, AWS, the tooling that quietly became the standard while everyone was looking elsewhere. Certifications are on the table. It's a two-fold thing, she says. It's interesting to her, and the company needs it.

A Computer Can Never Be Held Responsible

Ask Kacey about AI and the first thing she says is that it's a tool. The second thing she says is a quote she can't source and hasn't forgotten.

"A computer can never be held responsible, so therefore a computer can never make a management decision."

That's her whole philosophy in one line. She uses AI regularly, and so does everyone in her department: reformatting emails, laying down the base for a script, getting unstuck. It saves real time. She's not precious about it, and she's clear that if you don't like it, tech is going to keep moving anyway.

But the accountability doesn't transfer.

"I have to read everything. If it tells me here's a troubleshooting step for a problem I'm stuck on, it's still my decision at the end of the day. And I will be held responsible if I blindly trust it and break something."

She sees the same split on the client side. Some districts want Gemini on the Chromebooks and want to teach kids to use it well. Others want technology to stay exactly where it was. Both show up in her ticket queue.

Vendor She'd Vouch For: Ruckus

Verkada is slick. Sophos is slick. But when Kacey names a favorite, it's Ruckus, and her reasoning is refreshingly unglamorous: the installs are easy, the gear works, and when something does break, it's one phone call and a no-questions-asked replacement.

"If it doesn't work, they're on top of fixing it and helping us get a long-term solution. Ruckus is the one I've been the most impressed by."

Outside of Work

Rock climbing and running are the two constants. Lately she's been playing rugby and still shopping for a second sport. Basketball, hiking, and backpacking fill in the rest, which she'll admit is a fairly standard Colorado package. So is the Crosstrek.

She does tech projects and games in her spare time too, but the preference is clear: computers on the clock, outside off it.

And then there's Apollo.

Apollo is a thirteen-year-old cat. Kacey adopted him when he was nine, after seeing a post explaining he'd been in and out of the pound four separate times, adopted and returned, adopted and returned. She was still in college with a roommate and not really in a position to take on a senior cat. She informed the roommate they were getting a cat that day.

He's been with her ever since. He's her office buddy, though he doesn't generally make client calls.

A People-First Computer Company

When Nick asked if there was anything else the world should know, Kacey didn't reach for her résumé.

"I love that it's a computer company, but it's a people-first computer company. That's the reason why when I went to go find a job back in IT, Pine Cove was the first one I reached out to."

She left the K-12 world once. That was enough to know.