Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours

My default advice (because I've seen this more than just a few times) in situations like these is to wait 2-3 weeks, then go back to the manager and say, "Hey Boss, remember that automation I showed you the other week? Your experience proved you right; after our meeting I went back and tested some more because you were so cautious about the idea, and indeed found edge cases it didn't catch, and man it's a pain to work through them all so I tossed the code. Boy, am I glad you advised me to tread carefully there with all your years of hard-won experience!". Unless you can get at an actual-owner who would see the obvious direct benefits, slash the workforce, and protect you from the backlash, you are not going to progress anywhere by continuing to threaten your manager the way you are now. Getting demoted or even laid off is a real possibility for you with a reaction like that to automation. The management level to sell this to is the one that will benefit from decreased headcount while holding productivity at the same level (or some variation thereof).

In the meantime, keep your automation on the down-low, use it to free up your time, maybe share with a very close friend at work (if you know for absolutely certain they won't blab, as a reveal is exceedingly likely unless they are a fellow coder and see the logic in my advice above, and maybe not even then), then allocate the slack time to other activities that will boost your marketability on your own equipment (learn new stuff, write more code, etc.). When the time is right, find a better job and jet, and leave them never the wiser about the possibility of automation (unless you want to come back and sell your automation to an owner or high-level manager, for the estimated savings on 3-5 years of automated-away fully-burdened labor expenses, which will look good on their budget...just make sure you do a new/improved from-scratch rewrite with better error checking/etc. on your own time and sell that and not the code you wrote while they employed you).

My advice - quit and find another job at a more enlightened place.

In my experience nationality (or, to put it another way, the culture that you share with the people in your region) does matter. I'm certainly not saying that a nation's work ethic is shared by every single citizen - generalizations naturally don't apply to everyone. I'm also not saying that all companies in a country behave the same - there are going to be variations. But overall, the way you look at work varies greatly from country to country.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_men_work_so_many_hours.h...

The takeaway:

'Not only is work devotion a "class act" - a way of enacting class status--it's also a certain way of being a "real" man. Working long hours is seen as a "heroic activity," noted Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and her co-authors in their 1999 study of lawyers. Marianne Cooper's study of engineers in Silicon Valley closely observes how working long hours turns pencil pushing or computer keyboarding into a manly test of physical endurance. "There's a kind of machismo culture that you don't sleep," one father told her. "Successful enactment of this masculinity," Cooper concludes, "involves displaying one's exhaustion, physically and verbally, in order to convey the depth of one's commitment, stamina, and virility."'

The above shows that in many cases Long Hours Are Not About Working, but about signaling dedication and toughness (maybe Robert Hanson could write a post about this one.)

With that said: as someone who has worked many, many of those long weeks (and still does so on occasion) I do see some truth in there, but it's of course more nuanced. I've seen people work long hours because other things in their lives are going wrong (and they were escaping it), because of management pressure (this was in the lull between the previous boom and the current one), or simply because it was "crunch/launch time" (for real - which is a completely valid reason for a long week.)