The company I work for makes many things. One of the things they make, I will call the oscillating-degunkulator. Our oscillating-degunkulator was as good as any other on the market but it still had a few flaws. So I was put in charge of making it better. I tested, revised, and tested, over and over. Finally I had the best oscillating-degunkulator in existence, (it was slightly cheaper to make also). A week later the higher ups decide to stop selling oscillating-degunkulators. Nothing makes you feel better than seeing your hard work sit on a shelf and collect dust. Just had to share.
I worked tirelessly on Friday to clean the house for a party Friday evening. The kids, both teenagers who are old enough to know better, have been off school all weekend and today due to the snow. My house is a complete wreck again.
Welcome to my world.
figure9 - with the improvements that you made to the degunkulator, is it now cheaper to produce than the competition? Were your changes patented or part of your current companies intellectual property? If feasible and legal, maybe you should quit the company and take your ideas to a competitor.
My wife baked cupcakes and cookies for both of my kids’ school Christmas parties in December. It snowed and the kids were off all week. Then, she baked a cake in January for the teacher’s in-school baby shower. Said teacher wasn’t feeling well and left early that day, never to return (she’s out on bed rest now). And this week she made brownies for both kids’ classes for their respective Valentine’s parties. Snow, again, so no school, again. More wasted work.
This is pretty much the story of my career.
Stranger
Are you crazy? Since when is baking brownies a waste?
YUM…
I’m a project manager now, welcome to my world.
Weeks and weeks of work and meetings and thinking and planning and then…yoink! We’re pulling the project.
sigh
My company was started and gained fame by picking up some big clients and working our butts off for them for cheap. The big payoff would come when they had more money in the budget and we could do all the stuff they’d been wanting us to do that they couldn’t afford.
Now, 10 years later, they can afford to go with someone else. 
I have SO been there it’s not even funny. Nothing like a year on 24/7 pager and 70-80 hour weeks for nothin’–our clients weren’t just cheap, they were demanding.
And ended up falling so far behind on their payments that about a month after I walked out, the company laid off 75% of its staff for lack of money to pay salaries.
It happens all the time to businesses. They eventually learn to identify clients that do this or they go out of business themselves.
One of the things I learned from working from the ground up with a software company is never, *ever *do anything on spec. The Fortune 500 companies will disappoint you just as often as the little guy.
In my last job we spent the better part of 2008 in various cycles of planning meetings to scope out and get approval for the projects we wanted to do in 2008. We continued to do that until sometime in December of 2008. Number of projects approved…zero. 2009 the same exact process started all over again. I imagine if the company didn’t have massive layoffs, I could have made a career doing nothing for 20 years.