No. By the time you get hired and you are appointed a set of things to automate, it's usually followed by a long line of deliberation and resource management and prioritizing that's determined on the higher up.
There is a thing called "process debt", in the same way as technical debt, that some things are done manually. This can be mundane routine work, that might be up to 80% easy to automate, but allows for oversight and flexibility and often works with systems that are not trivial to work with. Other times the manual process is just cheaper to maintain than it is to invest in a "good enough" automation. You can also follow this by looking at the practice of offshoring and the amount of automation invested into offshored service centers (who benefit most from these solutions via specialization and scaling).
So even if the company hires a goddamn genius, if you want to automate stuff without breaking existing flows, you need quite a few months of understanding of the environment and the real needs of the process (business wise as well), etc.
And that's why managers think it's a joke idea.
(And it also comes off as extremely arrogant, because it's essentially calling your coworkers stupid by saying "I'll see something that you haven't noticed in years!")
> saying "I'll see something that you haven't noticed in years!"
It's also arrogant to assume that a fresh perspective will never yield fresh results.
I'm starting to think that the only way to work around the problem (if you actually are good at seeing things that the rest of the organization has blind spots for) is to become a consultant who is expected to suggest changes. Otherwise you will be stuck fighting against primate hierarchy instincts.
> "I'll see something that you haven't noticed in years!"
There's this saying in my country, roughly translated to "Guest for a second, sees a mile far" (sorry... it even rhymes and everything in Polish...)
Being immersed in something for a long time has a good chance of limiting your perspective to that thing only. While it's true that perhaps 90% of newcomers and their ideas simply miss the intricacies of the current process and would be disastrous if implemented, the remaining 10% is a genuine innovation which would never come from the inside.
Same here. Instead we have all these meetings where a ton of managers talk about their workers instead of letting the workers talk directly.
Using your software for the intended work can be very eye opening. I have had many occasions where I had to use stuff I had written and quickly saw a lot of inconveniences that could easily be fixed. When I asked users about this they agreed but they never asked because they thought it would be a difficult change.
Recently I had to use our SAP system and there would be a ton of opportunities for small changes with huge time savings but somehow it seems they never trickle up to the devs.