Hi AntiWork, I'd like to start by thanking everyone for their support and recommendations. I have had some recent changes to my career and I thought it was only fair to update you.
First off, my firm eventually found out what I was doing. Turns out, they didn't really care. As many of you suspected they knew that even with the automation they still needed me there for maintenance as well as the nightly verification I performed. So nothing really changed with the firm and they allowed me to keep working on and improving my script. As far as marketing the script, they haven't claimed ownership of it and instead simply asked that I allow them to keep it and train a replacement on it in the event I end up leaving. I ended up modifying my script to have pop up windows allowing user input so the replacement doesn't have to actually learn code.
Which leads me to the biggest update. They began to understand that I was over qualified for the position they put me in. Their idea of a system administrator and what a system administrator can really do was way off. So they ended up recommending me to someone else. Turns out our state government was expanding their databases and needed someone to help pick up the extra work. They only had a single admin who was managing 4 databases. It started as only 1 but has been growing over the last few years.
So I've officially been hired by the state as their new system administrator and so far I'm loving it. The only downside is I'm losing a lot of my free time and I'm actually working 10 hour shifts now lol. The upside is that the pay and benefits are much better. In addition, they've been told about my automation skills and as far as they're concerned, if I can manage to automate their systems they will continue to keep me on as the admin. I'm currently working at the capital building but once I've established myself they've agreed to let me build a tunnel and work from home.
I guess things worked out. It was a little scary when my secret came out but I'm incredibly lucky that my boss saw that as unused potential rather than laziness.
Thanks again AntiWork, maybe I'll update you again someday on my next big step.