I wrote a piece of code last year in probably no more than a few hours.Showed it to a few guys in my team.Instead of sharing my excitement,they were like "if you run this,what are we going to do then?". She was right,if I'd do it, the size of the team would be reduced by half.But then,what I'd get? Do I get a bonus the size of those employee's salary for 6 month? No.I'd get a grand or two and instead and a pat on a shoulder,while those guys won't find a job for momths.So what's the point?
Within the company, there is often no point. You want to be the guy selling it outside the company. You can easily claim tens of thousands for the same work then.
Management has to be ok with reducing headcount. You would think that all managers would be incentivized to made their groups more efficient but there is a high correlation between headcount and political power within an organization and people don't like to give that up for free.
You're in a delicate situation, since you'd be to blame for your co-workers potentially loosing their jobs. Nevertheless, doing nothing is also risky, since someone else from another department could show up and automate away your jobs leaving you in a hard place, and you won't have any control over that.
If you propose the automation yourself, and plan it's adoption within your team, you may have a chance of taking advantage of it, and even try to bring in more responsibilities within the company to your team to secure your teammates jobs.
The point is getting that thousand bucks before someone else does. Or to make the company efficient enough to survive in a market where the other company's already efficient.
Isn't really anything your team could do? Usually there are lot of fronts people could work on and bring more revenue to the company. Try to find those to redirect your team and implement your solution.
