#3 must be related to a local culture or industry, because I'd like to think anybody involved in that kind of logic would be laughed out of the room in a modern mainstream software company.
This can even happen in a tech company. More often than not, this is an issue with managers who are non-techie. They're not sure what automation will do, and since they don't know what's going on when processes are automated, they're reluctant to try. #3 can plague any company. It happened at Apple as well, in supply chain, far away from product engineering.
You know how every product on the Apple Online Store has details on how long it'll take to be delivered to you? E.g. 2 Business Days, 1-2 Weeks, Within 24 Hours. These quotes are manually changed. That's right. Every product on every Apple Online Store (e.g. Singapore, Hong Kong, China, US etc) has their own quote, and these need to be changed manually by someone.
I remember I hated the manual work and made several automation scripts that'll just do everything for me. The managers wanted to have nothing to do with it. "What if the script screws up?". That was their biggest concern. We all know that programs are more consistent than human being so that's nothing to be worried over.
I was only able to convince the managers that automation is an improvement after having everyone in the department using the script without their permission.
I suspect their reluctance was also due to some degree of "if it's not broken, don't fix it".
Likely the humans will fail more often than the automation. I worked in a place where they didn't trust automation to copy 1000 files from one server to another so they had someone manually copy the files every morning. I bet he missed a few every day.
You'd be surprised. You're basically hearing some version of this when you hear someone talk about "manual curation", which is really little more than a euphemism for this. It's usually PMs that I hear this from.
You would be wrong. I have worked at a company that is seen as a hip, smart, software company and so many of the reports are people going to the company DBA and just asking for a one-off report. The same "one-off" reports are often gathered monthly, quarterly, etc. and could be automated but aren't.
