[zero102]

I was for a few years in college a data entry clerk making $12.50/hr. It was effectively copy/pasting with some extra clicks and being a computer science student at the time I wrote an excel connector that did ~80% of my job. It only required me to intervene on especially hard data entry stuff (lots of math or formulas). There really was no benefit to tell anyone I did this. Not because I wanted to be lazy but it would just mean more data entry and not what I wanted to do (automating other people's stuff).

There's loads of these BS jobs out there especially when numpty salesmen are involved. It was relatively soul crushing because it didn't really afford me any extra time to do school work (cube farm yay) but I was able to basically zone out and make money, or stash some homework problems and work them while appearing to stare intently at the screen. I don't harbor any ill will towards them though unlike most of these /r/antiwork losers. They were friendly to me and it was just the culture there that "if it isn't done manually then we dont need a person to do it".

I ended up getting a couple raises and only left when I got my first real SWE job. I got in touch with them recently and there are still some scripts running some important IT processes I wrote many, many years ago running today.

[lizknope]

I worked at a small insurance consulting firm in 1994. Before I got there someone did data entry into a spreadsheet but then sorted all the rows manually by inserting and copying and pasting. I read the Lotus 123 manual and showed them how to sort with different priorities. Their mind was blown. They had been spending hours sorting rows and the computer could do it in a minute (it was a slow machine)

Then they would take the spreadsheet data and dial in to a mainframe and type everything in again. This was a system at a different company. They wanted the spreadsheet version for their own local records. I found that the mainframe had a "file upload" feature and I figured out the format.

I installed Linux on another machine, added in some old ISA ethernet cards and had a network. I saved all files as Lotus 123 and .csv and wrote some Linux scripts to convert the data to the format the mainframe needed.

I also wrote some wrappers around "grep" to find anyone's info in the daily Lotus 123 update files.

All of this should have been done in a database but I had just finished my freshman year and didn't know anything about databases and the owner obviously didn't know much about computers in the first place.

Anyway I got a $500 bonus at the end of the summer and a glowing recommendation when I applied to some real software companies the next summer.