I have to laugh at this. I worked in strategy consulting, where my coworkers were all MBAs from Harvard, Stanford or, in our office, Tokyo University. We had ma

I have to laugh at this. I worked in strategy consulting, where my coworkers were all MBAs from Harvard, Stanford or, in our office, Tokyo University. We had many cases where people had tasks of various sorts that they would handle with the equivalent of this screenshot-of-the-data approach. I, a fellow consultant, often groaned when I saw such things and wrote little utilities for them, figured out how to dynamically generate PDFs for their presentation data, or whatever. At one point, the general mgr of our office, said that these things were so valuable to everyone, and I was so good at it and seemed to enjoy it so much, that he was wondering if it wouldn't make more sense for him to take me off of my own consulting cases and make IT projects my only case. Of course, IT people were thought of as lowly support staff for the elite consultants, so it would mean a pay cut and end my consulting career. This wasn't a warning; he was just thinking that this might better serve the needs of the firm. That day I stopped being a valuable IT resource for my coworkers and reserved my dev skills for my giving myself a "sustainable competitive advantage" in my own work on my own cases.