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Comment by 01284a7e | Hacker News Reader

My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.

Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.

The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.

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The most shocking thing about entering Software as a career was the enormous number of "Brillant Paula Beans"[1] that are out there silently working, doing meetings, participating in all the software rituals, but producing useless and ultimately scrapped work product.

1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean

Yeah, the second one is really the most bitter pill - work for a year or more, see that the PMF or the actual product isn't going to meet the needs; raise red flags, nobody cares (or worse, people actively fight you and torpedo you) and then you get to see it literally do nothing in production.

I have seen this a lot in the mid sized business (<300 employees usually) and its the "we have enough money and no accountability and terrible processes to even understand the world" but my favorite one is my friend spent six months building a product offshoot from a core product, got pulled into meetings with directors to tell him to shut up about how it wasn't going to work for the target market, and when he finished they sold 4 units.

4 units.

I’ve been in such a work context for the better part of two years, as a contractor, and by God it is soul crushing to give your best to do a good job, and to see it ultimately ends up in the bin.

I quit weeks ago, and they are already begging me back because I was good at what I was doing, to work on yet another hallucination from the higher ups that will be scrapped in 6 months.

The good money doesn’t make up for the existential pain. Maybe I’m too old for this shit. (20 year career and a burnout that made me reassess the value of my time on earth)

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