Someone was building an empire by having employees do manual data entry instead of parsing json files. All the way up the mgmt tree there are fewer direct repo

Someone was building an empire by having employees do manual data entry instead of parsing json files. All the way up the mgmt tree there are fewer direct reports. Nobody ever gets a job title promotion by having fewer direct reports. Even worse, someone else now has to explain "why they did it wrong to begin with" regardless if the replacement technology existed or not at the time of original process creation.