Cancelled Projects and the Art of Strategic Indifference
There’s a moment every software engineer will eventually face: the project you’ve poured months into gets shanked. Quietly. In a backroom meeting. Dead. Done. Dusted. Over. Finito.
Not because it was bad. Not because it didn’t work.
Because… someone changed their mind. An executive shuffled a roadmap. A reorg happened. Someone’s ego got bruised. The “vision” moved on, as it always does.
And just like that, it’s dead.
No retrospective. No launch party. No legacy.
Just an email and a shrug.
I initially took these moments personally. I’d get angry, discouraged. Obsess over what we could’ve done differently. And honestly, sometimes I still do.
But after enough of these? You start to evolve.
You stop mistaking effort for permanence.
You stop throwing yourself on every grenade.
And I don’t mean apathy. I mean emotional triage: knowing when to protect your energy, when to care deeply, and when to let go and move forward.
My First Experience
My first taste of this came early in my career, and it wasn’t even my project that got axed.
I sat near a small team who’d spent months building a low-cost prototype board. These weren’t typical corporate drones. They had forged the kind of camaraderie you only get when you’re all labouring together in the same fluorescently-lit, windowless maze, united by the thrill of building something that mattered.
They worked hard, celebrated small wins, and often ended the week together at the pub. Despite everything, they genuinely seemed to care about what they were building.
I watched them inch closer to the finish line. Prototypes working. Specs locked in. They were incredibly close to sending it off for production.
Then leadership got restless. An executive had an idea, which is the corporate equivalent of explosive diarrhoea: messy, painful, and leaves everyone else cleaning up the aftermath.
Suddenly the project wasn’t good enough anymore. Make it bigger. Better. More features. A complete pivot. Never mind that they’d spent the better part of a year getting this version right.
The team lead pushed back hard. “Let’s ship what we’ve got, then start the next one,” he argued. It made perfect sense — ship, learn, iterate — basic product development.
But sense doesn’t always win.
I remember the day it went down. Someone tapped me on the shoulder just before lunch: “Go grab some lunch. Take your time. Do not come back until I message you.”
Okaaaay…
I left reluctantly, killing time in the grey winter drizzle, nursing slow coffees and watching the harbour. Waiting for a message that felt like it might never come.
When I returned, their desks were empty. Several engineers, gone. Just like that.
No farewell emails. No warning shots. Just empty desks and the kind of quiet that screams volumes. Eventually, HR provided the official version—they’re gone. No more details, no explanations.
They weren’t underperformers. They weren’t slacking off. They’d seemingly done everything right, and it didn’t matter.
That day taught me the first rule of corporate survival: doing good work isn’t always enough. But it took me years (and a couple of my own dead projects) to learn what to do with that knowledge.
The Human Cost
I stayed in touch with a few of those engineers. They thrived, moved onwards and upwards. But the human cost is real. Every cancelled project leaves ghosts: the designer who poured their soul into interfaces no user will see, the project manager who fought for resources that evaporated, the junior developer who thought this was their big break.
This is where the real skill develops: learning to grieve quickly, extract the lessons, and move forward without losing yourself in the wreckage. You can’t control cancellations, reorgs, or executive whims. But you can control how you show up next time.
Which is why I eventually stopped taking it personally and started taking care of myself.
Feel It Anyway
Before you harden into a jaded robot, let’s be clear: it does suck. You worked hard. Your team showed up. Maybe you stayed up late fixing something nobody will ever see—that deserves acknowledgment.
So feel it. Be disappointed. Vent to someone who gets it. (Just don’t do it in the Slack channel at 2am. Or maybe do… the bots need entertainment!)
Then close the tab. Take a breath. And ask yourself the only question that really matters: What did I learn that I can use next time?
Salvage the Gold
Every killed project has a hidden payload. It might be a reusable component, a better way to structure a service, or hard-won wisdom that teaches you to ask sharper questions at the next kickoff.
I’ve learned more from dead projects than shipped ones, and I’m not being dramatic. Failure forces clarity. You learn what matters, what doesn’t, and what you’ll never do again.
I keep a private document called Lessons from the Wreckage. No slides. No corporate spin. Just honest observations about what went wrong and what I’d do differently.
Lead Like You’ve Been There
When the project dies and you’re the senior in the room, you become the emotional anchor. Everyone is watching. Your reaction becomes their survival guide.
Start with truth: acknowledge that it sucks. No sugar-coating, no corporate speak. Then remind them that their effort mattered — we cling to lessons like lifelines in rough seas. Finally, point them forward: show them that something better can be built next time.
Junior engineers spiral when no one tells them this is normal. That cancelled projects are part of the ecosystem — the slow, grinding rhythm of corporate life. So tell them. Mean it. Equip them with perspective and context to survive the next setback, and the one after that.
Redefine Success
Here’s the uncomfortable truth no one mentions in company all-hands: most things you build will never ship. And of those that do? They’ll get sunset, refactored, renamed, or completely rewritten within a year.
Success isn’t what ships. It’s what you carry forward.
Your judgment. Your resilience. Your experience.
Your ability to build something great again, but with half the time, twice the context, and zero illusions.
Give Fewer Fucks, but Not Zero Fucks
This is the nuance that took me years to learn: If you stop caring, you stop growing. If you care too much, you burn out.
The sweet spot? Care while you’re building:
- Show up fully during the work — bring your best ideas, fight for quality.
- Fight for what matters while it matters.
- Hold it lightly, ready to let go when the universe, or just the roadmap, decides otherwise.
And never let one dead project convince you that your work didn’t matter.
Because it did. It always does.
Even if it only lived in staging, died under a random executive brainstorm, or was forgotten faster than you could deploy the rollback.
Every line of code, every interface you shaped, every problem you solved. It adds up. You’re not just shipping software. You’re building yourself into the engineer who can survive the next apocalypse.
And that? That ships every single day.