[wooster]

I spent a few years at Apple writing internal tools.

IMHO, this is the way to have an effect on a company completely disproportionate to any other activity I know of. The tools I wrote at Apple have enabled projects which, AFAIK, are completely unheard-of at any other tech company.

That said, don't expect a payoff proportionate to the effect of the tool.

From a company owner's perspective, however, excellent tools can provide an advantage that is difficult for competitors to match. That's worth an awful lot.

[leftnode]

Yup, I've done this as well at current and past jobs. I'll usually just invent a new project, it gets the boss's attention and they like it, so I get to work on that rather than the normal boring stuff.

It's great to invent your own projects at work.

[wizard_2]

Ditto - the firt few tools were small and only used by my team, the next few were big and used by everybody eventually, working on round 3...