The intended lesson of this article may be the "cattle, not pets" point made near the end, but I think there's another lesson hidden in it. This is the story o

The intended lesson of this article may be the "cattle, not pets" point made near the end, but I think there's another lesson hidden in it. This is the story of literally every single large project I've done under a tight deadline in my career: - Some non-technical department (usually sales) promises a customer something very big very soon, with no regard to how much time might actually be needed to build it. Fulfilling this promise "on time" is now your problem, Engineer. - Months are spent frantically building said Thing, working overtime, burning out engineers, and bastardizing the previously clean codebase in the rush. - The deadline is met, and no customer uses Thing for at least several months. Or the deadline is not met and customer waits for Thing as long as it takes, because they're not going to blow up a big contract or integrate with your competitor instead of waiting another month. They have too much invested and the deadline wasn't that important anyway. The third possibility, as it was in OP's case, is that Thing gets thrown away in its entirety due to some fateful turning of the organizational wheels. I swear, almost as if by some karmic law of the cosmos, literally every frantic deadline turns out to be irrelevant in the end, and you should have saved your sanity and gone home at 5 every day for the last 6 months.