While I agree in principal, speaking as someone who's been that person it creates a lot of stress when it's just one person. You never get a break from enhancin

While I agree in principal, speaking as someone who's been that person it creates a lot of stress when it's just one person. You never get a break from enhancing or fixing and maintaining the tools that the rest of the team is using, and probably lose opportunities in your "other" skills. You'll probably get no support from the actual dev groups in the company, never get funding to hire a contractor (which almost never works out anyway), potentially end up stuck career wise because if the tools are really useful your manager isn't gonna want to lose you to a promotion. A small "tools" team shared across some related disciplines under common leadership would be more ideal in my experience, but normally it's either beg for the real dev teams scraps or go rogue. I like using code to solve problems and automate things, but I have no desire to be a full time coder just like I don't have a strong desire to be a people manager.