On Spreadsheets
My first boss in the stats/data-science space loved spreadsheets - we basically never used them in our work, we did our crimes in R, but he always talked about how good they were at making a normal person sift through and comprehend massive tables of data like one of us weirdos.
It meant that when we were able to do work with Big datasets that wouldn't work in a spreadsheet, execs had a frame of reference to (over)value what we were doing especially when we could squeeze the results into an xlsx, basically giving us a job for life.
Since then I've done a ton of spreadsheet crimes myself so I respect them in a different way, but that point of view stuck with me.