Steve Blank managed to summarize something that has bugged me a long time:

Why is it that innovations require heroics to occur in our organization?

- From Why Innovation Heroes are a Sign of a Dysfunctional Organization

This happens in a lot of places. At one point a few years ago I had what was then – in that town and with my experience – what I considered a very well paid job.

Problem was, in addition to a number of very interesting tasks, I also spent a significant time of each year literally logging into systems, clicking through various software components, copying values one by one into a spreadsheet on my computer.

Being a programmer I knew that it wouldn't be a problem to improve this a hundred times, so I went to my boss and asked if we could send a request to the programmers to save the values to a CSV file[1]. I know if it was my software it would take less than half a day, but since this was old C++ code developed in another country I gave him an estimate of 14 days.

I argued that across the engineers at his team it could easily save work comparable to the equivalent of a full time position, and we felt stretched at that point.

My boss, which is a nice guy listened patiently to me and when I was finished he asked: I understand you are busy, should we hire one or two more engineers?

Not long after the market took a dive and I lost my job, joined a startup and became a much happier man :–)

I have seen this both before and after, but now feels like a good time to write about it since I don't think anyone I work with at the moment should feel to guilty about it.

[1]: Why not Grafana? If you'd been there you'd understood. This was old C++ code and while I thought I could possibly managed to get through with something like what I described, no way they would have accepted that. Or maybe that was the problem: I didn't ask for a project team, a development budget and a lot of fancy hardware and expensive software. We'll never know.