We have someone at my company who has been here for 30 years that gets to do whatever he wants basically - but what he builds is great. He doesn't even have a CS degree or anything related, he started as a paralegal who wanted to make his life easier, and has built several iterations of the software that the entire company uses. He's now my boss, running the data engineering and science department and I gotta say that he's genuinely great. The only bad things I've run across that he's built are things that he explicitly told management were meant to be just a quick bandaid fix to a problem to buy time for a full fledged solution... and they kept it as the full fledged solution. The stuff still works, it's just awful to make updates or change to