In a typical Malaysia corporation, it's filled up with highly educated, but lack of brain individuals, whom everyone working for a same goal, but yet fail to realized achieving goal also requires resources and efficiency is the core factor to determine profitability.
The ugly truth being, employer often looking for ways to cut down expenses. The Chinese old saying goes, 又要馬兒很會跑，又要馬兒不吃草。 Literally translate as wanted the horse run fast, but also wanted the horse don't eat grass.
It's not the first time I've voice my concern about the lack of flexibilities in the production server. I have requested them to make customisation on several reports, so we don't spent hours of manual extraction. Guess what the IT manager reply? If you're so good in information technology, why don't you come here sit down and write the script for yourself?
Well, he doesn't know I was actually from a very strong IT background. I choose not being in IT because I got higher pay in the sales line of business, at the same time I enjoyed the flexibilities, to communicate face to face with client, rather than talk to keyboard and mouse all day.
The issue got escalated to the management, I admit I was too emotional and rage about what I wanted doesn't get executed. I don't deny that couple of years back when I still "has" a dream of growing together with the company. One of the finance guy came forth and told me the customisation is kinda pricey. With the already over spent IT budget, they can't possibly making customisation for every marketing personnel so they can ease my job. Obviously, I don't get what I want, and company manage to save that 25k of programmer fee(which I think I can get it done for 8k if I'm still an IT guy). Sales team are still required to do the manual work. I've heard the bosses say, get your hands dirty, so you know your battlefield.
Time fly like an arrow, fruit fly like a banana. I've been manually extracting data, putting them into a spreadsheet. Sometimes I copied the wrong column, and the whole thing got messed up, and then I will have to go through the numbers again. Beginning of the month need to check on the numbers from last month end, end of the month need to tally this month's report 🤣 months after months, we already got used to all these nonsense.
Looking back all these years I've been doing all the data entry job, I don't regret at all for being paid as a sales personnel, but work most of the time as a data entry clerk. Until, I had a job interview yesterday, I think I screwed up by telling the potential future employer about all the manual work I had, because that shows how incompetent I am compare to what is offered in the market.
I'm literally not kidding. The company that focus on the wrong thing not only killing its business, but also career advancement of the employee. Imagine I had to go and make a coffee, finish the boiling hot coffee, head to take a dump, go for lunch for an entire hour, come back just to found out copying a dump of spreadsheet file of 40mb took me 2 hours. Best of all, it's on the intranet. Which means, this is internal data transfer(supposed to be faster than the internet), and it's slower than my 30 years ago dial up modem.
I think the company wanted is not a horse. A horse need to eat grass, and a horse is 1 horse power. It seems the company wanted a car. At least a car has more than 50 pony under the hood, and it doesn't need to eat grass.