> Or they fire you because they don't need you anymore.

This is the kind of ridiculous thinking I'm talking about in my other comment. You just made your job into a cheap, automated process. That's the most valuable thing you could do in a company! If you did that in my company, you'd get a promotion and you'd be put to work finding other things to automate. You're the kind of person every company wants! Why would we fire you? If we're dumb enough to fire someone like you, you're better off at another company anyway.

If companies were run in a logical manner, then your thought process would be reasonable.

Sadly, while there may be some logical people in a company, many companies (most?) wind up not being run in a logical manner due to a wide variety of internal politics and societal issues.

What you hope (and pray for) is that the logical people in a company are not also sociopaths, in which case you are really well and truly screwed.

That's crazy, I don't understand how people are so negative about this. Sociopaths will NOT fire that person, they'd put that person to work automating other jobs. This is just how you run a business.

    > Or they fire you because they don't need you anymore.

I think people are just assuming that the typical case here is someone automating their job to a degree where they literally don't have to do anything. I suppose that happens sometimes if we are to believe anonymous reddit and stackexchange postings.

What actually happens is that regular people who you would not assume are "programmers" start picking up computer skills and employ them in a piecemeal fashion a little bit at a time until eventually their day-to-day work becomes something quite different from when they started out.

This has been going on for at least as long as there has been a computer on every desk. I think "software engineers" should not be so smug to think that everything worth doing is something that they're going to get a chance bid on and then get a project managers or scrum teams to implement.

As for whether the person that does this gets fired or promoted depends on their skills at managing their peers and superiors, and what kind of environment they work in.