[z3t4]

When upper management see you are 10 times more effective, doing the same job as 10 other people, they might become interested. But if there's not enough job and you get paid for just sitting there, then use that free time to contribute on open source or something. Or maybe there's someone else there who has a pet project you can work on. If this is the case you should consider yourself lucky. At most jobs there's never a shortage of work. Eg. there are always more tasks that you can possible do and pressure from management that it needs to be done today, if not yesterday.

Also if you are that much more effective you could start your own business, hire people and train them, then have 10x bigger margins then your old employer.

[unixrefugee]

Thank you for your comments. I have toyed with the idea for years of going into business for myself, but have no ideas. I'm a sysadmin who knows *nix, macOS, Linux, and Windows very well. I can only write in "scripting" languages, as my jobs all the years required only those. I never really branched out into Python (I can read it), or C++, etc.

I have no idea what to do, what to offer, etc. It's funny, because when I'm at work, I don't really have to think too hard about solving a task. I'm generally the "smooth over" guy who fixes the things other people don't really see as issues, but having been in IT for so long, I can see the problems in the distance for a given job, as I've encountered them before. Most people just fly by the seat of their pants, but I love doing things once and well.

[z3t4]

Maybe you can be one of those solo entrepreneurs where everything is automated. Pick a niche that is very boring and are currently done by mundane manual work. For example accounting. Kick start by taking an existing product and sell the patchwork/scripts as a module/plugin. Maybe something like SAP. Don't quit your job until you are profitable though, and can just kill the project if it doesn't work out. It usually takes a few tries and a lot of learning until you figure out what works and what doesn't as an entrepreneur. eg. selling something people want (a faster horse) vs trying to sell something you think they desperately need (a car). Eg. pick the low hanging fruit, and don't be tempted to solve the hard problems until you have enough resources.

[TheRealDunkirk]

I've struggled with the same thing. Here's the problem: How do you farm yourself out for this sort of work, when the kind of people who need it done are the kind of people who can't see the need, even after you've fixed it, shown it, and explained it?

That, and I don't have the temperament to deal with the politics of the business side. I tried it, decades ago, and found it tiresome.