Internal access to developers is absurdly structured a lot of the time.

One company a friend worked for billed internal developers at twice what IBM would charge for projects.

At other companies, dev time is allocated without any kind of cost analysis whatsoever. It reminded our Romanian business analyst of the Soviet Union.

This happens to me a lot, but it's basically a kind of technical debt. Most of the time the upfront time investment to automate something properly versus doing it manually is hard to justify. Especially if it's a task that only I understand and now I need to document the problem and the automation instead of just the problem.

Business logic doesn't make for elegant APIs that I can hide behind a script and throw on a server, even if it's repetitive or tedious.

There's also the risk of allocating a team of folks with spare cycles, having the get half way through the work, then getting pulled into billable work and leaving it unfinsihed.