I'll throw my own similar experience into the ring. Let me take you back a few years, when I was hired as an editor at a traditional books-on-paper publisher.

I'll throw my own similar experience into the ring. Let me take you back a few years, when I was hired as an editor at a traditional books-on-paper publisher. These people had an arcane process in place for getting their printed products online. 1. Send PDFs to indifferent, bottom-dollar offshore vendors. 2. Get incredibly broken XML in return. 3. Task an editor with fixing that broken XML by hand (can't go back to the vendor due to extremely tight deadlines). 4. Complain to the vendors and hope they listen for next time. 5. Have the editor manually upload said XML to various hosting services. When that miserable list became my responsibility, I quickly turned to automation. I wrote scripts to fix up the bad XML, upload the content where it needed to go, send out emails to interested parties, and so forth. "Fabulous!" they said as they heaped on the work. I pushed my capabilities even further by writing more software to pump out ebook files and do other cool stuff. And I wrote long white papers about how we might modernize our broken electronic publishing procedures. But by this time, nobody was interested. I had become totally typecast as the widget maker, the guy that makes the cheap XML go zoom. None of the artsy credentials that brought me on board in the first place (English degree, writing portfolio, etc.) seemed to matter anymore. I was the tech. I was to sit in my corner and play with my toys. The end. I'm still here, but finally starting to cut my losses and look for an exit. Lessons learned! Thank you, HN, for allowing me this cathartic moment.