Haha, let me count the ways. This describes nearly an entire decade at Microsoft for me. It's not that bad. Some of those projects were amazing feats and fun to build. You eventually develop an "ok, what are you going to pay me to build next" attitude.
Some people may develop that attitude, but I haven’t. I care a lot about what I build and I care that it’s useful to people. I am unable to accept putting in tons of work only for something to never see the light of day.
A project I put years of my life into got killed off in a merger and it’s still the most demoralizing event of my career.
Careful not to imply that other's don't. I'm pretty passionate about what I build, but cancellation is a fact of life. Doesn't mean it wasn't fun to do the building. One of my projects at Microsoft was something that was always destined to actually be sold by hardware partners, and the hardware partners released devices that were far, far too expensive so it flopped and the whole thing was canned. But we made an excellent product that won some awards, and frankly, knowing we killed it on the software side is good enough for me.
