[2bor-2n]

>My $0.01: don't tell anyone if you find a way to automate something (if it's not in your job description).

Isn't this absurd. If you found a way to automate things, shouldn't you just take CTO on call and tell him that you have found a way to improve team's productivity. I think in this way you would be adding value to the team/company, which would eventually be favorable for you during your appraisal.

[loa_in_]

Anecdotally, in my singular relevant experience I had some really long running builds that sometimes failed, because some tests (unrelated to my team) had a race condition or accessed unreliable services.

I did try to get it fixed, but it was my first year in this 300+ IT personnel project and it was an already long before me known piece of technological debt.

I automated retrying those 30+ minute builds depending on which error messages popped up. Sometimes it was that, sometimes it was also another team's module version bumped that day that broke it.

It was fine for months. I joined other enginneers on hour long compilation time breaks for daily java. I never mentioned any of this to nobody. I just had to look up the progress sometimes.

One day I mentioned the fact to my direct superior. I met her at the lunch place, and confirmed that I'm doing my best having an 1,5 hour lunch because I had a glance at the 40-ish minute mark and the local build had to be redownloaded and restarted, which I automated - do I promptly used my time to quiet my mind and have a better meal than usual.

A 1,5mo later me and my 2 colleagues were laid off, and reportedly replaced by a remote team from a remote country. I am extrapolating quite a bit, but I gathered my superior taken this as a signal that we're redundant, because she overestimated the level of automation that went into this. Maybe she understood that I automated away the debug process? I don't have a straightforward answer.

I really didn't think much of that exchange until the later surprising ending was relayed to me by her. My last month there we spent wondering what went wrong. This is my best guess.

[bradknowles]

Everything depends on your manager, and their manager, etc….

You can easily go from being the superstar player on your team to being in the worst doghouse possible, simply with a change in your manager.

Yes, I have been there and done that.

If the new manager tells you one thing in person and then a different thing gets recorded in your personnel file, that’s a really big sign that you need to pay careful attention to.

So, when it comes to things like this, you need to make sure that you are always working in the style your manager wants, and on the things they want, and not letting your attention get sidetracked on something else — even if that something else could help greatly improve your life at work.