[coj337]

I used to intern for a large Australian bank and we had a fairly complex access management workflow.

A month into the job after I'd figured out how it all works, I spent a week automating it and was promptly told I was allowed to run my scripts do it if it was kept secret from the higher-ups (to avoid the red tape and the intern they don't trust much).

This automated a backlog of work that had a team of 5-10 people scheduled on for a good year along with any future requests, a month or two after my internship I bumped into my boss again they told me they had gone back to doing it the slow way because the bosses wouldn't approve it, despite showing a 0 failure rate compared to a pretty big one from the bored employees.

[gaius]

the bosses wouldn't approve it, despite showing a 0 failure rate compared to a pretty big one from the bored employees.

A boss’s prestige is in how many people they manage, not how many scripts they run. That’s the key to understanding these kinds of decisions.