Legal industry, in a branch of the law that's very high volume. We were paying a consultant $175/hr just to create basic SSRS reports until I learned to do it.

Legal industry, in a branch of the law that's very high volume. We were paying a consultant $175/hr just to create basic SSRS reports until I learned to do it. I'm sure plenty of other firms are still hiring outside devs at exorbitant rates. And when I explain what I do (mostly automating clerical or data entry/retrieval processes) to friends in other fields, a lot of them have said "Wow, we could use a lot of that at our company. We do X and Y and Z over and over and it's a huge waste of time." Small companies often force highly-skilled workers to complete their own repetitive clerical tasks, and medium companies seem to hire teams of $10/hr drones. They never think "At what point is this worth automating?" or they don't know where to look for a dev who can do it for them. I think the small/medium business CRUD app market is extremely neglected because it's not as glamorous as machine learning or whatever else all the MIT grads are doing these days.