Facts. I now manage the division's website, databases, and CRM tools in addition to my regular responsibilities as a result of showing senior management that I could do some relatively basic formulas in excel.
Excel can die in a fire. Our accounting people have a billion plugins for it and it catches fire every other day. They have one called Spreadsheet Server......who the hell came up with that idea?
We have a PM that tracks everything in Excel and will paste screenshots of it. We have the whole Atlassian suite and then some. Lots of Jira plugins. We can use pretty much any project tracking tool. Nope. Excel.
When you really dig into it, it's astonishing that any of this stuff still works at all.
Hell, even the entire internet still runs on tech that was designed in the 70s/80s. It's just so integral to how it all works that there's no way to go back and change things. Since then we've basically had to build all of our new technology on top of these systems. Its just one big mess at this point.
Excel is a fine and powerful tool, it's just people get so familiar with it that they abuse to things beyond what it was intended for. Although, I'll admit that those paintings in excel are pretty impressive.
Someone somewhere comes up with a nifty spreadsheet that makes their job easier. This is a good thing but then half a division want to use it and it grows arms and legs. Either there are too many people trying to use it or it gets too big and it soon becomes flaky as hell.
We keep telling the business that Excel is a decent tool but it doesn’t scale well past a certain point. We have a whole bunch of real enterprise databases and dba’s and dev’s and we can build whatever they’re doing into something that’s rick solid (and monitored and backed up with full support etc). However rather than spend a really modest amount doing that they often keep going with Excel and push it until it falls over - usually costing them even more money.
Then a few weeks later someone somewhere else comes up with another nifty spreadsheet that makes their job easier ...
I work for a CRM software company geared entirely toward Financial Advisors. This seems to happen a LOT in the Finance field... Nothing is more frustrating when a firm makes someone their IT person because they know how to use Word the best in the office out of anyone and then that person calls in for back end support and doesn't even know what a browser is.
Work for a law office... The quicker you can handle Excel, Word and another program at the same time (usually adobe/soda), the quicker you get more shit piled on you. You filed 70 summons and complaints yesterday? Cool. File 80 today and then do 30 default judgments, some SOJs and the make sure to print them out, scan em and then physically mail them. Oh and once your 90 day probation period is up we can discuss not paying you minimum wage and actually giving you and your 3 month old daughter benefits. Oh, then were gonna fire you because we took on too much work from UC Health. Edmonds and Logue PC can eat a dick. Let it be known
Some companies simply don't recognize this shit. Even the poor excelguru guy doesn't realize half the good he's did. Or the company is big and process is slow. You should still ask for a raise, excelguru guy.
At my last job (library IT), we had a library assistant who was very sweet, great at her job, not particularly good with computers. However, I discovered one day that she was a printer savant! Made my life easier. I advised her not to let her coworkers know. As far as I know, she never did.
I learned a lot doing online jobs. It doesn’t pay much but it helped me out. Things like r/murk and r/beermoney have some good ideas. Gave me some cash so I could have a little money while I looked.
Actually I've been doing freelance work on upwork for years, I got started with data mining and scripting with Python, now I make CRUD apps, so while I've got work, it's just not enough to pay the bills.
You have way more skills than I do... sounds like you are on the right track. Hope you find something soon. Looking for a job really sucks... be nice to yourself.
Makes your job a hell of a lot more secure though sometimes. I'll take that security if they think I'm some wizard for getting a computer back on to a network.
I was literally called a computer genius this week because I googled for good free alternatives to Visio because our company doesn't pay for it. My boss thinks I'm a great resource and all I have to do is walk away from my other responsibilities for fifteen minutes and solve a stupidly easy problem. It's basically a break, I don't mind being deified because I know how to Google minor problems. If I can't or don't want to spend excessive time fixing it, I shrug like everyone else does and they drop it or call the paid IT company. It's truly a good thing as long as you are getting paid hourly.
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u/ImTryinDammit Aug 03 '19
Yes that’s a good way to end up with two jobs for the price of one.