I liked reading this! I'm glad you found happiness doing this sort of work! One thing I'd say is that it's awfully tough to do this sort of work as a contracto

I liked reading this! I'm glad you found happiness doing this sort of work! One thing I'd say is that it's awfully tough to do this sort of work as a contractor when there's a (direct) hourly cost for your time. It's tough when you're on salary working on an internal project... but doubly tough (not impossible) when you're a contractor! Theoretically, it would be in clients' best interests to improve efficiencies, but it's really hard to get a client to sign off on hundreds or many thousands of dollars of work for a future gain that's hard for them to grasp. (Getting them to grasp it is part of our job, of course) Then after the fact I say, "Remember when this used to take a week? Now it takes an hour". Once you do that a couple of times, management gets the point (usually) This is great advice. It's all about those metrics and demonstrating the value of your work!