Whether or not the original story is made up, I did this a long time ago at my first sweng job. Because some of the leads hated me, I got transferred to what wa

Whether or not the original story is made up, I did this a long time ago at my first sweng job. Because some of the leads hated me, I got transferred to what was effectively a punishment team - officially I was hired as a game designer and then officially moved to the programming department, but then I was moved onto "cinematics", which meant setting up shots, camera transitions, and dialogue timing. Naturally I had zero qualifications to do this. Another person moved onto the punishment team was a QA tester that a lead had actively tried to block hiring. The supposed justification for this was that cinematics were behind schedule (this did seem to be true, at least). Anyway, within a couple weeks me and the QA tester (who also knew how to code) had written a set of tools to make our work 3-4x faster and improve quality, so the three of us got our work done in a couple hours a day and spent the rest of it doing whatever we wanted - watching tv, working on side projects, reading programming books, etc. To me the best part was that if I hadn't automated this the rest of the project would have fallen behind, because at that point the entire design department relied on my unauthorized side project (a comprehensive set of authoring and debugging tools for the design team) and I spent some of my spare time maintaining it. Game dev is wild.