I was just coming to say that! I get the "best" of both worlds, Excel sheets to track production while I sit in this shitty factory and breathe God only knows what!
Bonus: I can't even afford a home after it all! Yay America!
Yeah, I live in a area of the country where (only since 2020) we can expect long stretches of days where the sky is orange and the AQI is 300+. Climate change has made sure the toxic fumes are for everyone!
Don't get me.wrong I really love excel and enjoy spending my days playing with it; but sometimes I'll look at my work in a big picture context and don't understand how I make so much money doing a totally made up thing that serves no practical purpose.
If you tried working at your company for a week with no paperwork or spreadsheets you'd realize their necessity pretty quick. You are a bureaucromancer. Very little gets done, and none of it on budget, without you playing with spreadsheets all day.
Soldiers might fight a war, but logistics wins one. It's no different for business.
I felt the same thing watching my partner working this morning. I've been with him 10 years and I still can't explain his job beyond its title because as far as I understand he oversees people as well as works on software that's developed, deployed and managed by another company, but they don't manage software or services or develop anything but they deploy it, but that's not not his team, and it's this one specific program, but it's actually 12 integrated programs, and he's working on one that's in development but he's not a developer, but is not part of anything they're actually doing yet, and that's not his main role.
Everytime he explains it, I get more lost...
What is this job? It's obviously stressful, a lot of other companies rely on on whatever this service is, and my partner, as of this year, makes 8x my income, so it must be important.... Right!?
Right!? He's not making 8x my income pushing pencils....right!?
I teach General Education at a community centre for people who missed out on formal schooling.
My job is 3 words "I teach SOSE", and you know almost exactly what I do you can picture the main tasks and also picture my output (educated graduates)
His job did not exist 15 years ago, the concept of a job like his in software for the masses did not exist 50 years ago, a desk job to this degree of pencil pushing did not exist 100 years ago.
Sometimes I think about how my job is technically one of the oldest in the world, but never a well paid one.
Sometimes I consider a pencil pushing job for a few years, to just get my retirement fund sorted, but if I don't even understand what the job is how can I expect myself to do it?
There's a third one, too, it's a funny one: you stare at countless (mostly fake) job vacancies expecting to be hired so to "deserve to survive", while bills can't stop arriving. You resign from your 10-yr IT career and try to apply for a simpler, factory vacancy, just to hear from HRs that your CV is "too good to be applied for our simpler jobs". In the meantime, you catch yourself selling your soul and autonomy (constantly forced to accept the circumstances) to these people that share the same blood lineage as yours (some call them "familiars") because you can't see another option, except for going homeless, where you'll be constantly assaulted by cops and people saying "go get a job" to you because you got nothing. By the way, you also inhale toxic fumes from air pollution from cities. And you stare at a Word document, your own CV, thinking "what did I do wrong?".
Is your experience IT exclusively, or do you also have (even rudimentary) programming experience? Industrial automation is a great option. I feel blessed, having started from below the bottom (not all people are fit to be parents!) working as a metal carpenter while still underage, to have managed to get into this field, through hard work and, most importantly, a good amount of luck.
Fucking excel. Lemmy lemme tell you. At a former position my boss wanted me to make an economic model in excel. I begged to do it in R but no dice. Annoyingly VBA was the skill all other employers were interested in (in my brief foray into industry). I had a million sads.
VBA is horrid and incredibly outdated. I've written c# code that ran identical calculations on data being run through excel at literally over a million times the speed.
I hate excel so much I almost wanna consider the toxic fumes.
For years I assumed it was as simple as making large tables, and that was it. It was truly humbling when I had to use it for the first time and learned how much shit you can do with that software.
Work sucks but Excel is actually super fucking awesome. I love Excel. Once you get good at it, it helps with your personal life. Spreadsheets are great for tracking personal finance and all sorts of things.
IDK if you're familiar with the Anime, but in this scene the 5 year old green hair kid is pointing at his favorite super hero and crying because he just got the news he'll never have a super power.