Laid Off for Innovating: The Irony of Automation

I took this position almost two years ago after the previous guy left. He had been working on a project to automate a system for nearly three years but hadn’t even completed 10% of it. After he moved to another company, I took over. The project wasn’t even management-approved, so I worked on it as a side project during weekends. Eventually, I got it to work, reducing our team’s four-month workload to just three hours with the new automated system. Despite this achievement, I didn’t receive a bonus, recognition, or anything. And now, the company has decided to lay me off because the software I created has automated most of our work. They decided to cut the team in half, and since I was the newest member, I was included in the layoffs. What an achievement.