Reminded of a couple of projects: 1. I worked with a single internal guy to build a web-based ordering system, in the days where people faxed in orders. This

Reminded of a couple of projects: 1. I worked with a single internal guy to build a web-based ordering system, in the days where people faxed in orders. This replaced weeks of data entry, dozens of part time data entry people, and enabled a big change in materials ordering and production (orders were all in a database within a few hours, vs literally weeks of keyed-in faxes from before). The one guy that was in charge of all this suddenly had a lot more power internally, and it pissed off a lot of other folks who suddenly had less influence. 2. More recently, worked with a team of external contractors, and internal folks were resistant to help any of us set up external dev systems. They all worked in the physical offices, and had no need for 'run a dev system on a laptop'. One of our guys spent a lot of time (and kept getting chastised by the client's mgt) for getting and documenting a build process for external contractors to use. The pandemic hits, office buildings are shut down, and internal folks have a much harder time figuring out... how to do anything from home. In both cases, under-the-radar skunkworks projects ended up having large (and in one case transformative) impact and value, but were ignored or fought by those with entrenched power.