[donalhunt]

My stance has always been to lean on the available tools to free up time to work on the more interesting problems that deliver value to the organisation / company. Has been a good strategy to date.

Sadly, the current environment does not reflect that in my experience. There is a vicious focus on keeping profit margins at a steady rate at all costs while slashing spend on tooling which requires re-work on solved problems. :/

At some point the music is going to stop and it's not going to be pretty I suspect. :(

[chii]

organizations that don't trust their engineers to work towards delivering value (by using better tooling, efficiency increasing automation etc), means that they don't improve and is accepting the current status quo.

That's why you need to keep an eye out, and smell whether the management understands it or not. Plan to leave, as your value contribution will not give you back the reward that such contributions deserve in this type of organization.