Not that often
I'd guess that in development you wind up doing a lot of repetitive work as you literally translate forms over. I'd guess that someone good would have found ways to cut out steps so that adding more pages would go faster.
Speaking of cutting out steps, good people would find ways to eliminate steps for the users, spotting more opportunities for automation. Or they might come up with useful little tools to make people's lives easier. You'd be amazed what good a creative developer can do for an organization by solving problems that they hadn't known that they had.
Conversely a bad developer creates work for everyone else around. I'm sure that you've encountered the breed.
And a second concern with reporting is what fields mean. Typically people wind up with these complex sets of fields, and complex reports against them, but the data in the database doesn't really mean what people think they do, and the reports aren't quite what people think they are. When people act on these reports, there is a risk that they don't think about there.
And a third question. How confident are you that all of your queries actually say what you think that they say? A small mistake in a query might not just make it take 2 hours instead of 2 minutes. It might make you do an extra outer join, doubling multiplying the numbers by a random factor. Have you thought about how to detect this, and would you notice?
But you're right. With how some organizations work, they make it hard for quality people to make a difference. At some point good developers have to choose to be in an environment that enables them to perform to snuff.
Cheers,
Ben
