The Great Resignation of Scripts: Why This Is the Year IT Teams Break Free from Manual File Transfers

As IT teams struggle to maintain legacy file transfer scripts amid high staff turnover, now is the time to consider moving to automated file transfers.

Your IT team spends most of their time maintaining file transfer scripts—scripts that nobody fully understands anymore. The Great Resignation hit the tech sector hard, with voluntary attrition surging nearly 50% year-over-year in late 2021. What many companies are realizing now is that those folks took with them vital knowledge of how those scripts work.

The Script Maintenance Death Spiral

Every organization has that folder. You know the one—hundreds of PowerShell scripts, batch files and Python snippets that somehow keep your data flowing. Each script was “temporary” when written five years ago. Now they’re load-bearing walls in your data architecture.

Many IT professionals report that work stress prevents them from upskilling. They’re stuck maintaining scripts instead of learning modern technologies. Of course they’re leaving.

Pro Tip: Count how many people in your organization actually understand your file transfer scripts. If it’s fewer than three, you have a single point of failure masquerading as a process.

Tribal Knowledge: The Ticking Time Bomb

Your senior developer just gave notice. With them walks out years of undocumented knowledge about why that one script needs a 30-second delay on line 47. This isn’t hypothetical—70% of service organizations anticipate operational challenges from knowledge loss as employees leave.

The tribal knowledge crisis compounds with each departure. New hires spend weeks reverse-engineering scripts, often breaking things in production while learning. The average IT position takes 32-42 days to fill, followed by 12 weeks before full productivity. That’s four months of reduced capacity every time someone quits because they’re tired of debugging legacy scripts at 2 a.m.

The 2025 Automation Reality Check

The workflow automation market is exploding, heading toward $51 billion by 2030. Everyone’s promising “digital transformation” (whatever that means this quarter). But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most organizations are automating new processes while their critical file transfers still run on duct tape and prayer.

Progress MOVEit Automation and Progress Automate MFT software could help your company escape script hell.

Progress Automated Managed File Transfer Options Could Eliminate Scripts

MOVEit Automation software offers a web-based workflow builder with visual IF/FOR blocks and conditional branching. No more writing scripts for basic file routing. The platform handles thousands of production tasks daily through drag-and-drop interfaces.

The platform’s event-driven triggers actually work—files arrive, workflows execute, no cron job archaeology required. It monitors folders, responds to API calls and handles complex scheduling beyond what Task Scheduler can manage. Built-in capabilities include OpenPGP encryption, compression and those file manipulations you’ve been handling with regex nightmares.

Automate MFT software is another route, great for cloud-first teams. It’s designed to let teams easily create, manage and scale essential file workflows, all with no-code tools.

Using an intuitive point-and-click workflow designer, IT teams can quickly set up, schedule and monitor file movement with minimal manual effort—no need for complex scripting or hands-on intervention. Centralized management allows teams to control, audit and troubleshoot transfers from a single interface, greatly reducing errors and operational overhead.

With a lightweight agent architecture, Automate MFT software makes it easy to deploy and manage file operations across cloud, on-premises and hybrid setups without disrupting existing workflows. This streamlined approach frees staff from repetitive, error-prone tasks and enables IT to focus on higher-value projects.

Real Implementation: Highmark Federal Automated 52 Workflows to Save 10 Hours a Day

Highmark Federal Credit Union turned to MOVEit Automation software to help streamline secure file transfers and gain visibility across workflows. What began with four automated tasks soon became 52, and the credit union now saves seven to 10 hours of work a day.

Quick Win: Start with your most fragile, most critical script. If MOVEit software can handle that without custom code, you might have found your solution.

The Low-Code Escape Hatch

Something teams might appreciate about Progress’ approach: They admit you’ll need code sometimes. Sometimes complex workflows across hybrid environments necessitate custom scripts.

The MOVEit “low-code optional” architecture lets you embed PowerShell or VBScript when the visual builder can’t handle your edge cases, while still automating these transfers with scheduled or on-demand triggers. Your existing scripts don’t become worthless—they become automated file workflows in a managed platform with proper logging, security and error handling.

The platform provides FIPS 140-2 validated cryptography and tamper-evident audit trails—the compliance checkboxes your scripts definitely don’t have. Every file movement gets logged centrally, so when auditors ask about that suspicious 3 a.m. transfer, you have answers beyond “let me check Dave’s laptop.”

And Automate MFT software enables task versioning to track changes automatically and save specific changes with admin comments. Perhaps your team rolls out a big update and suddenly file transfers are halted. Task versioning makes it easy to revert back to a task that works.

The Bottom Line on Breaking Free

The Great Resignation exposed what IT professionals have known for years: maintaining script collections is soul-crushing work that drives good people away. With IT workers facing significant burnout and many actively seeking new opportunities, something has to change.

Maybe your team can’t escape some code for complex logic. But you can use a tool that helps significantly reduce manual efforts and the number of scripts your team has to maintain with an automated MFT solution.

Uncomfortable Truth: Every day you delay modernizing is another day your competitors get ahead while you’re debugging that mission-critical batch file from 2015.

Start with one workflow. Pick the script that breaks most often or the one only Dave understands. Build it in the MOVEit Automation or the Automate MFT visual interface. When it works—and more importantly, when someone besides Dave can modify it—you’ll have your business case for ditching the rest.

The script graveyard doesn’t have to be permanent. Your IT team deserves better than eternal script maintenance. And your business deserves better than file transfers held together by tribal knowledge and good intentions.

Ready to stop the resignation bleeding? Evaluate the automated MFT solutions available from Progress.