17) There is such a thing as "coding yourself out of a job". If you make things too efficient, management might decide they don't need you any longer.

I was working as "grunt" laborer at manufacturing company to pay my way through college. I hurt my back on the job so they gave me a light duty job. The company had an automated inspection system storing all the inspection data to a huge SQL DB. When I showed them how they could take the data to produce reports for QA/QC they changed my job to IT. Three months later, I had effectively reduced the time the QA/QC staff spent on compiling their reports from 24 man hours a week down to about 1 man hour. My reward? A pink slip.

I'm loving it now because they called me begging me to come back and fix it because someone broke it about a month ago and none of their "experts" can fix it. They wanted to bring me back at my old laborer wage. I damn near fell out of my chair laughing at them. I told them I'd fix it but at my price, not theirs. I'm still waiting for their response to my offer.

Am I wrong to be "blackmailing" them? Probably. Do I care? Not really.