I had a prior job out of college where I automated the vast majority of the technical position I was in. It was a combination sys admin and data validation role

I had a prior job out of college where I automated the vast majority of the technical position I was in. It was a combination sys admin and data validation role for the government -- not really my interest, but it was after the economy melted down and finding a proper programming job was tough. Over the span of about a year, I had a set of scripts, batch jobs, and other forms of OS/database level automation that made most of the manual tasks we had obsolete. Unlike the original article though, I went to my manager and bragged about it. My manager was ecstatic and had me deploy the same set of scripts to the entire team. I would now be in charge of coding it full-time and got to implement things like authentication, a UI, reports, a dashboard, and so on. I eventually left that job because I was desiring a more proper engineering role, but it was a good case of win-win for full-blown automation. It didn't replace any humans (though it certainly could have), but instead our management had use it to enhance the existing humans and have them scale.