[twox2]

A lot of industries, despite being "tech", are still just using computers to "push paper". That means a true technical person can often automate these jobs. It's real and it does happen. The thing is... most people like that are not content doing that and then fucking around all day. I've been in this position. I've shared my automation with the team I was on and the manager I had, and I got a raise. I did this at more than one company when I worked in operational roles, since then I'm more engineering focused so less opportunities to do so.

[radicalbyte]

Same here - my first real job involved putting reports together by collecting/combining data from various sources.

Spent the first month doing it be hand, second month I pulled an all-nighter and automated the easy 80%. The last 20% of automation involved switching from Excel to a website - that took a couple of years to make happen because I needed to convince people to make the change.

I spent the time I received improving my skills and automating other things, as well as helping colleges with work which did require manual intervention.

[VBprogrammer]

If you add socially normalised work from home to any of these stories the opportunity to do the very little becomes obvious. When we all had to come into the office for 8 hours a day, even if you managed to automate most of your work you still had to show up and sit at your desk.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, just consider all the places where PDFs are still used instead of a more computer-appropriate format (fixed layout is generally not needed, sometimes even not for printing, and is sometimes even an hindrance, and (m)HTML can be used as a standalone file too...)

[twox2]

Most opportunities are definitely data-entry oriented. For example, making a report in a spreadsheet and then having to feed some of those fields into some kind of form in a web-based UI, or vice versa.