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Comment by odonnellryan | Hacker News Reader

I agree here. My best projects have been reconciling financial data, or automating reports for MSPs, or copying 100k products from one platform to another, or ...

You get it. Sometimes the problems are cool - like some of the financial recon projects I worked on required neat algorithms (not complex or exotic ones, but "fun" ones) to solve something in Python in 1 minute that a R programmer's (they weren't great) script took 10 hours to solve - but most projects are boring implementation wise.

Actually, most of my really, really good and valuable work doesn't amount to any more than comparing Excel files, and giving you a report on that data. Tons of companies need that.

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When my kids (or anyone) asks me what tech skills to learn that will have a long lifespan I say Excel and SQL. Being the "Excel expert" at work is sometimes more valuable than being the Javascript expert.

It's a commonplace observation that data has more value than code to companies. Lots of their data is in spreadsheets and databases (relational or otherwise). I've seen medium-sized companies running their operations in Filemaker, Access, and of course Excel. In big companies you'll find departments using the same tools. Critical to the business, not technically interesting or challenging. Plenty of work/money in that. Same for WordPress sites -- lots of them, most of them need work, not sexy or particularly challenging but you can get top dollar doing that.

Yeah but boy can SQL be frustrating! When learning you have to balance rewarding activities with valuable knowledge and skills. Excel maybe isn't so frustrating (unless you're trying to do stuff like, short-circuit "or" statements .. )

I much prefer to take the data into a language -- like Python -- and do analysis on it. Sometimes (actually, 1/10 times in my experience) this is not actually possible, so SQL is a great skill to have.

I know of three fortune 100 companies that run 100+ person departments entirely from Excel. Massive Excel files.

I'll take SQL over Excel anytime.

SQL was frustrating to me when I did not know it very well. Taking the time to learn SQL (especially analytical flavored queries) and relational algebra changed not just how I write software, but how I analyze other developers. RA is one of those can't-be-unseen tools that I think everyone either learns directly or spends effort/years doing poorly.

Give a man matching CSV columns, get him paid for a day. Teach a man to VLOOKUP, get him paid for a lifetime.

..or something like that..

Hey I did Recon work when I was at a bank and my boss was totally amazed when I wrote a script that performed reconciliation in seconds compared to there method which took them hours to do.

How do you find financial clients how are looking for automating repetitive tasks

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