> Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. > > And the people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other, probably more interesting, jobs.

I don't mean to pick on your example too much. However, when I worked in financial audit, reviewing journal entries spit out from SAP was mind numbingly boring. I loved doing double-entry bookkeeping in my college courses. Modern public accounting is much, much more boring and worse work than it was before. Balancing entries is enjoyable to me. Interacting with the terrible software tools is horrific.

I guess people that would have done accounting are doing other, hopefully more interesting jobs in the sense that absolute numbers of US accountants is on a large decline due to the low pay and the highly boring work. I myself am certainly one of them as a software engineer career switcher. But the actual work for a modern accountant has not been improved in terms of interesting tasks to do. It's also become the email + meetings + spreadsheet that you mentioned because there wasn't much else for it to evolve into.

I did qualify it with "most people" because of people like you who enjoy that kind of work :).

I would hate that work, but luckily we have all sorts of different people in the world who enjoy different things. I hope you find something that you really enjoy doing.