My dad did this for someone's whole team as a favour because he overheard what they were doing over lunch or something like that. Later, he met the manager of t

My dad did this for someone's whole team as a favour because he overheard what they were doing over lunch or something like that. Later, he met the manager of the team he'd done it for and asked if they were going to transfer any of the employees that got freed up for the work and she said "no, there's still lots of work to do and the speedup, while helpful, wasn't major." Went to her retirement party a year later and got the truth: Her pension was tied to her salary as a manager as an average of her last three years, and her salary as a manager was directly tied to her number of reports. If she'd have given up half the team as she could have, she would have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars over the rest of her life. There was a lot of that type of stuff going on when computers first came in and hackers here and there started optimizing things. Individual interest and politics doesn't disappear.