[cjarrett]

my first paid coding work was at a wind energy company as an intern. I did a lot of manual input into a piece of software for 9/10s of my internship. The other 1/10th of my internship was writing a web-app that acted as a counter for each type of legal document category. They had created their own documentation system with project-Category-count schema. Each of the employee within the compliance group had to figure out the current doc-count for any new document's category, and there was no real gating mechanism before the document entered the hard-copy vault. This led to numerous duplicate items (ala, two documents labelled HR-1042-4).

My simple web app, which took virtually no mental effort to create other than learning the source code system and some vanilla Web App / SQL, was treated as a god-send to those employees. It was still being used 6 years later, though I've lost track relatively recently. Always interesting to hear interesting stories like that out there.

My brother's workplace (from my distant vantage point, keep in mind) could have saved millions upon millions of dollars had it had a dedicated technical engineer working on crafting automated reports that connected their massive databases of data to its operational scientists instead of spending 2-4 hours on building the report themselves during the worst time-crunches.