[justtopostthis3]

My very first job as a young teen was basically this!

I asked if I could just have access to the origin database instead of getting printouts, automated the whole thing, and continued to get paid for 15 hrs/week or whatever the legal limit was to spend about 4 seconds clicking "run" and the rest of the time goofing off.

Even convinced them to let me set up remote access and work from home once I demonstrated how much faster I could work that way. Good times.

[heavenlyblue]

You probably ended up costing them the same amount a professional solution would cost but since you’ve spread that cost (and risk) over a large amount of time it was justified.

[justtopostthis3]

Eventually I confessed because I wanted to work on some other technology problems the company had, and the owner of the company sat me down for a chat.

She explained that legally, the company already owned any software I made on company time, but she wanted to buy it from me properly anyway, and asked me to write down a price.

I wrote down what I thought was a completely insane amount and she frowned and shook her head. "Sorry, I don't think we can pay that." She wrote down another number and passed it back.

She'd just added more digits to my number. It was more than my take home pay for the entire year.

After I accepted, she explained how sometime in the past they'd paid 10x that price to a "professional" firm for a prototype that didn't even work.

Several years later, at another, bigger company, I created a solution to a similar but larger scale problem we had in my spare time and offered it up for free. (I never learn.)

Instead, they signed a $2.5 million deal with a "professional" firm to create something.

That CEO bet me $100 it would be running smoothly in production in 6 months, but I could only take the bet if I didn't quit. I patiently explained how their proposed solution could not even work in theory, and wished him good luck.

10 years later, they were still doing it manually.

[heavenlyblue]

> After I accepted, she explained...

That’s _exactly_ what I was thinking about when I wrote that comment.

[tvjunky]

I think you're heavily discounting the "that's the way we always done it syndrome". However, they were willing to give the "kid" a shot.