Feels like my experienced reality of task automation in corporate environments. We routinely have engineers spend 40+ hours automating tasks that an entry level person can do manually in 10 minutes and only need to be done weekly. Automation at all costs seems to be the future

It’s certainly not a new phenomenon. I appreciate this XKCD [1], with a chart of “How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you’re spending more time than you save”

It’s not the final word, since automation has other benefits: documenting the procedure’s steps, reducing human errors, increasing consistency, etc.

1: https://xkcd.com/1205/