> Took me an afternoon to write a simple C# tool to ingest a number of files and spit out the data that she needed. She had been waiting over a year for my software team to get the go-ahead to do it as a built-in feature.

The counter to this is that this tool now has no support (which may be fine depending on the tool).

I remember my first job which was 30% SW and 70% other engineering. We wrote a few tools to automate stuff that our customers used.

One of our customers came to my manager and told us he had a tool we wrote over 5 years prior. It was a small Perl script. Their data source had changed formatting a bit and now the script no longer worked. They wanted us to update the script. Several hours were spent between the two teams arguing. My manager did not want to own it. He said he had no record of it, and none of the people on his team had any memory of it. We did not own it. They kept insisting "One of the engineers in your team (who had since left the company) wrote it, so you own it!"

I pointed out to the coworker that the request was so trivial we could have solved it in under an hour, and the company had lost more money by arguing. The counter was "If we fix it, they'll keep coming back to us and in the long run more money would be lost."

Over the years, I've realized how right he is.

I do occasionally write simple scripts to help our customers, but management always makes it clear to them that this is an unsupported prototype, and the customer needs to maintain it.