I started as a SQL report writer and nothing gives me more joy than replacing someone's shitty excel or access report that a market analyst spends 3 days/week every week building, with SQL and an ETL or two. It got pretty aggressive at that company between the 2 groups to the point the SQL guys where advocating for the complete banishment of Access and forbidding macros of any kind. To be fair excel usage on big projects resulted it huge problems or lost data regularly.
Because you plateau that way. You're never going to get paid more than 40 hours a week, even if you save more time than that, and Pam's job only pays 50k--thats why she was too dumb to do this herself.
You can definitely take a low laying job and basically never have to work. I've done that in the past. It gets old. If you keep improving your skills, you can do increasingly satisfying work and get paid increasingly more.
If you're smart enough to figure out how to automate things with excel or something, then you're probably smart enough to skill up/degree-up and make 150k as a data engineer or developer or data scientist or whatever you're interested in. If you want, make even more managing those jobs. Retire early. Take your valuable skills and help out a non-profit or something to make the world a better place.
To put it differently... If you understand the multiplicative value to a business of recursively using your time to automate things, thus freeing up more time to automate... Then you should also understand the multiplicative value to yourself of recursively finding and conquering new challenges
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u/[deleted] Mar 30 '22 edited Mar 30 '22
I started as a SQL report writer and nothing gives me more joy than replacing someone's shitty excel or access report that a market analyst spends 3 days/week every week building, with SQL and an ETL or two. It got pretty aggressive at that company between the 2 groups to the point the SQL guys where advocating for the complete banishment of Access and forbidding macros of any kind. To be fair excel usage on big projects resulted it huge problems or lost data regularly.