I've also made the mistake of sharing my tools only to find criticism but no offer to help make improvements. Fuck em, wasting my time.
Have experienced a ton of this too. One of the biggest internal tool mistakes of my career was to ship a tool like op's: Got yelled at for using company time to work on non-sanctioned work only to have the person yelling at me end up using my tool for 6 years. Colleagues would get pissy with me when drift happened never updating the tool themselves. Was in a weird position where I had no actual "sanctioned time" to work on the tool but was still required to support it.
But... the biggest rub: my manager (yeller from above) took all of the credit when upper execs eventually caught wind as client-facing changes were happening literally days faster. Something about "building a dynamic team where people are allowed to innovate" - my name wasn't even brought up according to the exec that I was close with.
If I could go back and redo everything I'd hide my work as it caused me nothing but pain, suffering, and bitterness. The reward for good work in so many places is a crack of the whip and more work.
Many organizations punish the members who work hard with more uncompensated work like you have described.
A patent you'd want credit for. A journal paper co-authorship likewise.
I'm very much in favour - especially for non contract LOB works - journalling moral copyrights formally.
Of course we've Github and the similar now, which is amazing, if you use it for such. I am currently working on a possibility to open source a range of advertising trading middleware (dates me, huh?) with the establishment of a Community Company* copyright holding structure that rewards individual contribution regardless of origin, weighted by calling / execution paths / additional necessary weighting as necessary, enforced by statutory articles of association bound in incorporation.
* Industrial and Provident Society : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_provident_soc...
articles of association bind the company members to the terms of their articles which are imbued with the same statutory powers of Companies Act, which has 400+ statutory summary criminal offenses adjudicable in the Companies Court. Companies Court, like Ecclesiastical, isn't very well known to even exist, even among the legal profession. However, very much unlike claims heard in the Chancery Division (which must be for greater than fifty thousand British pounds or go hence to the County Courts which exist for extension of the High Court originally for handling the volume property claims, and before which I won't give the most robust tort better than a bitten nickel worth chance.)
edit was unfinished, mea : unlike in Chancery, claims in Companies Court go quickly, because the weight is summary and summary findings of breaches of Companies Act are Criminal offenses, and therefore will shape the further claims evaluation considerably. It's almost a British Delaware system, and in keeping with the theme of this discussion, I was reluctant to write this, lest case load spoil the advantages!
> I could see not wanting to support a tool.
So my refusal to drop the emergency that I was fixing (on my day off) in order to modify this tool that had already saved her probably tens of hours of tedium, let to resentment and ultimately to me being fired from the place.
I'm in a much better place now ))
Man, we live in a society… glad you are in a better place now!