IME from doing general work at 3 companies in different industries (which might not be fully representative): Also sorry, turns out i ended up venting

>someone has to do it, and if the pay is adequate, it's a matter of attitude.

the pay is adequate for the value of the work (which is low), and it eats up your time which actually lowers the average value of your work to the company. it isnt anything other people cant do, it's just the stuff that piles up because it isnt really critical to get done but should still get done. think about what you would have a coworker help you with at your job if you had a lot to do and they asked you if you needed help with anything.

>are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid?

Yes they are underpaid because the job responsibilities are usually pretty fuzzy. you are typically given some basic responsibilities but then expected to find more work to do yourself via talking to people. so its on you to both find valuable work to perform using your general knowledge (kind of fun / interesting tbh) and also somehow be convincing that your contributions are better than what they would have gotten from an average generalist (nigh impossible). It becomes very hard to get people to recognize you going above and beyond, which is necessary for raises. So you are very dependent on having an incredibly observant manager who applies above average attention to detail when reviewing you.

how you get this work as a generalist, btw, is you ask people what they need help with. It isnt an issue with attitude, it is just one of relevance. An average generalist can be fine with this, but if you are above average at multiple roles then it becomes a point of opportunity cost. you will never work on the high-value things that someone else more specialized at the company is capable of working on. you will work on the things that were preventing that person from spending more time on the high-value things. they might talk to you about it and you might give them thoughts on the work, but it will be so casual as to be awkward for them to give you any credit for it.

>if such a position really has influence, it actually sounds appealing to me

It can be a very enjoyable position BUT you stall out - it will typically fall under some sort of generic business analyst job title at a small to mid-size company (ie not at a company with an analytics department for you to advance in). youll be encouraged to "build" that department by yourself, in your downtime, without any approved budget for it, without adding anything to anyone elses processes (ie requiring them to stick to a data entry format). So people at the company will typically like you, but you'll hit a lot of resistance trying to get past like $70k (near NYC). It makes me think that 1 good generalist is valued close to but beneath 2 junior employees with a bit of different specialization each.

the only way I can recommend a generalist position is if you are buying significant amount of stock in the company, fully believe in the product/service, and understand that sometimes in order for a team to do its best there needs to be a thankless support player somewhere in there.

you dont have noticeable influence, btw, you just know what you did and feel personally good about it. you get to sit in on meetings, typically as a note-taker (because you offered to and it makes sense because you have a bunch of misc responsibilities anyway), which means you get to make sure the most important things from a meeting are emphasized, questionable things are highlighted, and you can speak up in the meeting itself to help address misalignment's before they happen. the meetings themselves tend to get credit for your contribution rather than you, albeit sometimes you can make pretty direct call-outs that will get you credit for.

the general vibe was kind of like, you are an alert system and garbage collector. a lot of the time the alerts are received as helpful reminders of issues that would have been caught somehow anyway. but that's kind of a catch-22 for proving your value. you feel fairly confident they wouldnt have caught the issue based on the nature of the due diligence you applied to the situation and your intimate knowledge of the related business operations. you cant exactly point why you think the issue would have gone unnoticed without throwing someone under the bus, which isnt fair to do before the issue actually arises. the catch-22 is that the issue isnt going to arise because you pointed it out, but you cant prove it was necessary for you to point it out unless you dont point it out.

So you need an observant, reasonably skeptical manager on the same page as you to notice the shitstorms you prevent. But even then there's typically no direct means of compensating you for it. you get labelled a good employee, quickly jump to that 70k area pay cap into yearly inflation adjustments, then you end up just getting more soft benefits like openness to alternative work hours, no resistance to taking time off, and such. With the caveat that you have to correctly read the room on these things and assert them yourself because you wont be getting an email detailing such perks. that is all well and good, but it seems better fit for someone near retirement then someone with goals of trying to buy a house and raise a family.