Wow! You summed up my whole soul sucking experience in my previous job in tech. I quit that job over a year ago. Now I’m a press operator at a company that makes vinyl music records. The fruit of my labor is obvious, I make on average 900 records a day per press, I’m often operating two presses, so that number is actually around 1800 records a day.

Even though I see the tangible results, I also see my supervisors struggling to translate that into bits of data in various spreadsheets. They’re all worried about press downtime and defect waste. Because I understand they have to feed the information machine, I give them the data they need. I don’t have to sit in a meeting about it ever, I just get to make records and go home.

However, the pay sucks. So now I’m forced to continue to find another tech job simply because I need more money to survive and *gasp* actually put some money in a savings account. So I’m staring back that abyss you just described.

Ain’t life grand! 😃