> My incentive to automate anything for them ever again was gone. I feel that a lot people have this exact problem. There's not a word for it, but there shoul

> My incentive to automate anything for them ever again was gone. I feel that a lot people have this exact problem. There's not a word for it, but there should be. It's definitely an anti-pattern. In my case, the way I got into "software development" was by automating things in my work. It has a lot of pluses and it looks like delightful magic to people who aren't expecting it. It can bring enormous value in places that desperately need it. But there's a dark side to it. The dark side is that you find yourself alone dealing with problems using only stuff that you built. Like you said, you're at the focal point when things go wrong. No Q/A, no help-ticket system, no buffer, no one to manage expectations. To make it worse, your boss, your peers and your PM's eventually find that, all of sudden, their workplace has a mini "software development department" that is integral to the mission. That's kind of jarring if they're not adaptable enough to handle it. If you try to get involved with actual software development folks in other teams, you're shunned because you aren't "really" a software engineer until you prove yourself to them (which may never happen depending on how rigid the org is). I've find that to make this kind of arrangement work, I have to be willing to be a "one man band" for much longer than I feel comfortable.