Got made redundant 3 months ago, my job was to overhaul the aging and inefficient IT infrastructure. Quite literally the entire companies work practices were to be moved onto this new software: employee database, salaries, accounting, equipment tracking, fault reporting, job booking, job allocation, client portal. Everything.
The company was a family run business where salaries, whilst not huge, weren't sacrificed in the pursuit of profit.
4 months before I left, we got bought out by a conglomerate. They weren't happy with the current wage bill, most likely they'd calculated they wouldn't see a return on their investment for several years and the quickest way to fix that was to cut the wage bill by cutting 15% of the workforce.
I went through 3 redundancy meetings (this is the UK) over the span of a month, where I repeatedly asked what their plan was with my software I'd created. As at this point, it was about 60% done, some workflows were 100% moved over, some 10% moved over. This meant that for some functions I was still acting as a safety net and manually moving data across to fill the gap until I'd finished the software as a whole.
At the end of my final meeting they announced my legal redundancy and an hour later force logged me out of all but one of my work accounts. Which meant I wasn't able to provide a hand over to help with keeping the software running.
It's been 3 months, and I've had numerous phone calls asking “how do i xyz?” At one point someone managed to delete the entire database of booked jobs for the next 4 months (about 300 clients). The accounting department have reverted to excel, which now takes them 3 days to do salaries every month, my software did it in 2 hours. I generally helped out where I could, but because they'd removed me from the system there was often very little I could actually do.
The biggest slap in the face came about 1 month after I'd been made redundant. I still had 1 account left running, i originally set it up as a user testing account so I could run checks as if I was a general user. It was still tied into alot of things…like salaries. I got an automated notification that showed they'd given raises across most of the upper management employees.
So much for cutting that wage bill.