Yes this is one of the most true things I have ever read based on my own experience..

In 2009 I was hired to do mostly helpdesk / IT support for a printer/copier sales company, making $36k

By 2012 I was making over $80k, being taken on the annual company trips with the high sales earners (cabo, hawaii), etc..

All basically because I set up a web based dashboard that aggregated numbers that their Sales CRM stored in a SQL database, which saved the Sales Managers tons of time every week..

I continued building this out / milking it for a few years, adding new reports and features.

It was the worst spaghetti code you have ever seen, SQL statements placed inside of HTML tables, wow it makes me kind of sick thinking about it now, I did not know what I was doing.

None of that mattered though.