How many rake tasks can be run at once in rails?

Does anyone need the kind of information work I do full time?

• I automate a lot of tasks for my Web publishing company, but I'm not a developer. What kind of information worker am I, and does anyone need what I do specifically? I've been working as an editor for the same people for about ten years now. When I started out, I was hired for my journalism background and better-than-average technical knowledge. Several years ago, my company started demanding more and more reporting from its editorial staff, so I picked up Ruby to help me automate a lot of my reporting. It started with stuff like "fill out a publication log by scraping RSS feeds." About two years ago, I took it a step further and started automating Google Analytics reporting. I eventually married the two and built a Rails app. Over the past couple of years, I've been doing lot more programming in that vein: - My company reuses a lot of content between a number of sites, but the CMS doesn't let us do that easily, so I wrote a Web interface to a small app that allowed other editors to repurpose each other's content by clicking a bookmarklet. - Newsletters for some of our sites have to be coded by hand, so I wrote scripts to generate newsletters for fellow editors. - We run a dictionary site and I wrote a "word of the day" widget for iGoogle - When our development team wouldn't provide common-sense functionality in our CMS, I wrote some Greasemonkey scripts to address the problem. What started out as a personal project to gather Analytics data is sanctioned by management now, so I gather stats for 40 sites and 20 editors. I coordinate reporting from editors that adds ways to calculate cost effectiveness of content, how well certain kinds of content perform, how well certain writers do with given content types, etc. It's the kind of reporting editors could do for themselves, but not in a time-efficient manner, and not with the precision I manage. I've described the system I've set up to other Web publishing types and they agree that it sounds pretty useful, especially for people who aren't paying top dollar for the more elaborate analytics systems. The problem with all this involves three things: 1. I do all of this on top of the same responsibilities as everyone else has. 2. I spend a lot of time trying to sell my boss on automated fixes to ridiculous tasks. Most recently, I wrote a small amount of code to process spreadsheets that were taking editors four or five hours to complete. 3. There are a lot of things the editorial team ends up having to do the long or hard way because the managers we work under don't really know how to communicate with developers. Coworkers are frequently saying things like "why don't the managers just let you go talk to them first so we can figure out the easiest way to do this stuff?" As near as I can tell, my boss and other managers at his level are happy to hand out the reports I'm producing to their bosses, and they're grudgingly pleased when I can work out a way to fix a problem so their team won't lose a week to something we could run through a script in an hour, but they don't really value the work I'm doing to the point they're willing to move me into a position where I could do more of it. They're capitalizing on my curiosity and the fact that when I'm faced with repetitive work or hills of data, I'll spend four hours to program something it'd take me eight hours to do by hand, then share it with everybody else. Really, why *should* they bother changing my responsibilities when they get all that for "free?" I'm convinced I need to move on because nothing is really changing and my repeated attempts to get my job description changed have gotten me vague promises that "they'll look into it," but I don't have any idea where I'd fit in elsewhere. I like solving problems, I like the analytics work I do because I like working with big pools of data and looking for trends in them, and I like helping people get things done with less hassle. I make a little money on the side with a small Web publisher who's needed me to convert older sites to newer CMSes for him, and while I don't really know PHP that well, I'm not afraid to look at it and modify it. For all that, I'm just not sure which direction to go, or who out there needs someone like me. Does the kind of stuff I'm doing fit into any 40-hour-a-week job? Or am I better off considering consulting? Or am I delusional? I make over $70,000 a year doing what I do for these people, but I'm bored with the half of the job they pay me to do, and I'm tired of doing two jobs. What's next for someone like me?

• Answer:

  You are a programmer, but your lack of systemic experience or education in it means it'll be impossible to get a job at 70K as a programmer. I dunno about systems analysts or BIAs. Maybe you can market yourself as a manager?