A problem that is rampant in programming, is that many of the tasks at hand take longer to write the program to automate them, than it would to just use manual labor to do so. For example, a program I worked on was to create a web-based form to update a web page and upload a file to the web page. This would have been done more quickly, except that it needed to be done in precise order, the web page i was updating was written by a novice who had horrible HTML skills. All in all, it took me about 15 hours to code all together, because of extra bugs that popped up like the number "1" that popped up on every line of this one file when i opened it in the program. Anyway, I was paid $15/hour for this program. that comes out to about $225 before taxes. That program was really NOT worth $225 to write. It would take all of 10 minutes a month to update the page by hand, and that, at $15/hour is a much more managable $1.50. This kind of problem is all around. Only one of my programs had saved any kind of money, although that was actually about $12000 a year total saved by the program, for a payment to me of about $500, so i guess the company comes out better in the long run.

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