Been sitting on this for a while, wanted to finally get it off my chest.
I started a job with a new company a few years ago – they're sort of a startup in that they were about 8 years old at the time and I was the first employee other than one of the owners' wives who was a bookkeeper.
One of my projects was to build a machine to help make producing our product faster. I was excited for this as it let me be creative, learn some new things, and solving problems is something I really enjoy. I was given an absolute shoe-string budget, and designed a pretty cool, mostly functional prototype. I scavenged parts from old electronics, I 3D printed a bunch of the parts after designing them myself, I spent hours upon hours of company time trying to figure out how to make this thing work.
Two years later of working on this thing in my spare time at work (which was not often) I was about 90% finished. Had one part left to work some bugs out of (really I just needed a position sensor and to work out the associated programming) and ended up taking some time for parental leave. When I came back, I found out my one boss had completely scrapped my idea and come up with his own working prototype. To his credit, it did work, but he basically took us from 90% complete back down to 30% complete, as his prototype was 100% manual, while mine was completely automated – push a button and wait 3 minutes for the cycle to run. So even though his 100% manual prototype worked, it meant we'd be going back to the drawing board on the automation aspect of it.
Additionally, he gave himself basically an unlimited budget for the machine. His prototype cost a little bit less than mine, but his final design involves some high end linear actuators and a bunch of proximity sensors and a higher torque motor that add up to nearly $5k just in motion-related parts, never mind the housing, electronics, and other associated costs. I had to fight with both owners about getting a high torque NEMA 23 motor (roughly $100) after my original NEMA 23 (which I nabbed from a personal project for this proof of concept machine) didn't have enough torque for our application. I was never given a strict budget but I was given stern looks when the total spend started approaching $350 in parts and materials.
I was then basically thrown under the bus about it – “Oh, u/tje199 was working on a design but it had fallen way off his radar and was not progressing as we had hoped, so we went a different route.” Man, you gave me a shoestring budget to build automation equipment from scratch and then only let me work on it when I literally had nothing better to do, which was almost never. Give me a $10k budget and allow it to be my focus for a few months and then see what I can do, instead of just scrapping everything I'd been working on.