I guess in many cases it really depends on whether the people in your workplace have enough programming experience and/or skills to actually have an opinion. There were two guys on the floor with programming experience and both of us had the idea of automating a few of the 80,000,000. tasks that were just copying information from one database system to another.

To make a long story endless, the department management (through our self-promotion) saw that we were reducing the call times by reducing the amount of typing and gave us the go-ahead to expand our little projects. The problem was that we were pretty much at the limits of what we could do with the tools I had at hand. These were severely limited due to the IT department's policy of having an iron fist around the software on our PCs (even though many of the people there knew more about our Win2k systems than the IT guys did). I was using JavaScript as an input parser (cut and paste), grabbing useful bits of information and reformatting them so our other software could generate more useful information for the techs. The other guy was using VBScript to write macros to generate reports for management. I asked that they install Perl on my machine so I could do more more quickly. Once our managers made the request to IT, my end was put pretty much on hold because they didn't want to put any new software on our PCs. The reason: They didn't trust third-party software to not crash the one machine I needed it on.

I've switched to the first person singular here because the other guy continued to use VBScript and got everything he requested and was promoted to another department so he could write Excel macros that color-highlighted QA spreadheets. The IT department had just enough knowledge to have a prejudice against anything that wasn't an MS product, whereas the department managers were happy to use whatever gave them the best results. Of course, what should I have expected? The company was owned by a MS exec.

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Allolex