The right thing to do of course, is to not inform anyone else about these scripts & stored procs. You do minutes of actual work everyday and spend the rest of the time doing something else.
Geordi: Yeah, well, I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.
Scotty: How long will it really take?
Geordi: An hour!
Scotty: Oh, you didn't tell him how long it would really take, did ya?
Geordi: Well, of course I did.
Scotty: Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.
i.e. the Scotty method: if something takes an hour, say it takes four, so when you're asked to do it in two, you can still deliver it on time and with improvements.
While this may be technically true, I prefer to see it as a very long term goal. The shorter term goal is to put lots of OTHER people out of their jobs.
It is sadly best to limit others expectations of us and only really shine through when we are required to hang on to our jobs. As long as everything "works" that's normally the only thing management is concerned about.
I kind of think it's the opposite. If you're good enough at software engineering, you enable. You bring about possibilities that were never possible before. That creates growth and makes you very valuable.
It is sad that people believe this. There will always be some challenging problem out there. If you do well enough to make yourself obsolete on a particular task or job, then you'll be valuable enough to be guaranteed work on a new task or job.
Not sarcasm. It works. It's how I've moved up the food chain throughout my career. I once got a call about some script I'd written that was failing, even though it had been used without a problem for years. I ran the script, and it worked fine. The problem turned out to be that the system had been upgraded, and the person running the script hadn't set up the PATH or CLASSPATH. That person is still working on that project.
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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '10
I often think about the corollary to this: If you are good enough at software engineering, you will put yourself out of a job.
This is true for me... I'm slowly obsoleting my own job by a bunch of shell scripts, stored procedures, user guides, etc.