In 2001 at my first professional job I was the web manager for the student unions at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. At the time there was an old unmaintained ColdFusion app for student group registration. Having recently been dabbling in PHP for the unions websites, I proposed writing a new student group registration site from scratch in PHP. My manager approved, I gathered requirements from the stakeholders in the office for student activities and 3 months later shiny new mysql-backed PHP registration system.
They also did cool things like let me open source the custom CMS I wrote and push forward with a standards based HTML template while the rest of the University was still on a standardized but antiquated table-based template.
I realize now that I've been incredibly lucky with the people I've had above me in every single organization I've worked for in the last 15 years.