I agree with the points in this editorial, there's a lot of resistance from some jaded IT staff about improving their processes and tools, in case they 'do themselves out of a job'. This isn't necessarily true - while the ideal day for a DBA is spending time behind an interesting magazine (because, of course, all your scripts work PERFECTLY and the estate is running itself under your excellent management!) in reality there is always work to do.

If I can write an SP and a bit of ASP code to effectively automate a boring manual process (hundreds of manual INSERTs, anyone?) or do this using tools like bcp or BULK INSERT, all the better. If I can use the SQL Search SSMS plugin rather than complex queries on sys.objects with sp_msforeachdb, all the better. If I can use UCP, PBM, even SQL Dashboard, or some of the Red Gate products to take the hardship out of my job - brilliant. Steve's absolutely right - while I'm not manually monitoring for disk space problems or data file growth, I'm doing something interesting like performance tuning or planning for growth (or, indeed, posting on here!)