These things get really weird really quick. I worked for a hardware startup that (of course) had just brutal delays in shipping their product. This included scr

These things get really weird really quick. I worked for a hardware startup that (of course) had just brutal delays in shipping their product. This included scrapping an entire product line and shipping a less ambitious, but somewhat orthogonal one. So 3 times in two years there was a big push for the marketing, customer success, developer relations, and support etc teams to get ready for a launch that never happened. How exactly is a customer success person supposed to be judged as a high performer if there are no customers? Support people sitting by a phone that never rings? This is an obvious example, but I find the same thing really often in engineering groups: "I was asked to do X. I killed myself to make X happen. Turns out X wasn't relevant to the business and now it's all being shut down and I'm a lower performer."