"We're not shipping? Well, that's a bummer, but also, what a relief! If building it that was this hard, I can only imagine how bad shipping it would've been; now we can delete that code and with it all of the maintenance we would've had to commit to for years."

The personal attachment just had to go eventually. It proved not to be terribly helpful or healthy anyways.

I accepted a long time ago that it is all for naught :)

Enjoy our time on this earth, do what we can, focus on people and it'll be alright

However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago.

[0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questionable commercial decisions, working on the wrong thing, etc. But some at least is a legitimate result of evolving markets and needs.

I knew this, but took the job because I was burned out and knew I could spend a year or two coasting and padding my resume with some interesting things.

I came to the conclusion that the company was a grift, but at least they took care of their employees and included them in the profit part of it.

We had startup perks that were basically paid out in cash when the pandemic hit. The “gym” perk became $500 in cash which could be spent on anything vaguely fitness related, like an Apple Watch. The commuter benefits rolled into our accounts which gave me free tolls for years afterward. Instead of taking all the money, they cut us in.

So yeah, maybe frustrating if you expected your startup to be successful, but that’s so often outside of the control of any engineer. It’s always a crap shoot. Get your best offer and make the most of it. You can do resume driven development even in the shadiest of firms.