This is especially important at the seams of our profession. We've got a couple of guys doing the admin-type stuff for customers at work. They usually don't do any programming at all, and thus their focus while solving problems doesn't usually include any non-trivial automation.

From time to time I encounter a situation where one of them slugs through some hideously boring task by hand, wasting hours, for something I could wip out a shell script in a couple of minutes for. Usually, that's because they haven't been given any useful tooling, and more often than not, a programmer knew about that and didn't care. Turns out, some of us are really good at ignoring our colleagues' suffering for that matter.

Also, turns out people are generally really grateful if you can tell them 'just pull the data out into an Excel sheet' and give them the data they need after a couple of minutes of "wizardry".

I've been bumping into this kind of thing a lot lately. Flipping embarrassing. But it's hard to know which pieces of suffering you should think about when there are so many little papercuts you've learned to not notice.

This is one reason why moving jobs somewhat frequently can be very beneficial. You and your employer have different sets of papercut blindness and you can both help each other.

I've often had this same thought about starting a new job. I'm going to have to use "Papercut blindness", the mixed metaphor makes me smile.