Sure. The gist of it is that I worked in fields like marketing and analytics which were high-impact, but where people spent a lot of time doing things manually (this was ~5 years ago-there’s a lot more automation in these sections of companies today.) I wasn’t the best marketer or the best programmer, but I realized a lot of things that people did every week could be automated. So I automated those tasks, saving a lot of man-hours for a lot of very expensive people. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s very easy to make the case for an 80% salary increase when you’ve just completely automated 4 jobs.
Today there is a term for this role-”growth hacker.” But in general, if you work in an environment where not much automation has already been done, then automation is massively valuable. I’ve saved/earned companies millions of dollars with awful code that happened to solve the business problem.
Heh, now I feel silly for not noticing your username… I actually linked to the Quora question where you left an answer in my original comment. Thanks for the info!
Cool! Can you give us details?
Sure. The gist of it is that I worked in fields like marketing and analytics which were high-impact, but where people spent a lot of time doing things manually (this was ~5 years ago-there’s a lot more automation in these sections of companies today.) I wasn’t the best marketer or the best programmer, but I realized a lot of things that people did every week could be automated. So I automated those tasks, saving a lot of man-hours for a lot of very expensive people. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s very easy to make the case for an 80% salary increase when you’ve just completely automated 4 jobs.
Today there is a term for this role-”growth hacker.” But in general, if you work in an environment where not much automation has already been done, then automation is massively valuable. I’ve saved/earned companies millions of dollars with awful code that happened to solve the business problem.
I’ve written this up in a bit more detail on Quora and on Hacker News
Heh, now I feel silly for not noticing your username… I actually linked to the Quora question where you left an answer in my original comment. Thanks for the info!