[hanginghyena]

There's actually significant learning value in time spent figuring out legacy systems and linking them together. Doing ad-hoc reporting is the IT equivalent of being a short order cook.

Do it long enough, and you learn how to make almost anything from nothing.

And that should be considered an employable skill....

[scottlamb]

I agree. Deciphering legacy systems, integrating them, debugging them, and finding minimal safe fixes involves a whole set of legitimate, resume-worthy skills.

> Doing ad-hoc reporting is the IT equivalent of being a short order cook.

Nice analogy.

I used to do a fair amount of ad-hoc reporting on an Oracle database. I used joins (inner and outer), subselects (or self-joins), aggregates, window functions (or whatever Oracle equivalent existed at the time), etc. I'd never hire someone who said they did ad-hoc reporting with SQL but didn't know joins, and I'd be skeptical of someone who didn't know some of these other concepts.