It’s never easy saying good bye. Sometimes you see it coming, sometimes you intuit that it’s going to happen, and
sometimes it smacks you out of left field. Today’s departure was of the smacking variety.
While this is less the project being blatantly axed and more the project being put on hold (at least, that’s the
messaging), I’ve only seen one project come back from the shelf, so I don’t hold high faith for this one. I’ll be doing
the best I can to spend a cycle or two on it to keep it up to date - you know, just in case it does come back from the
dead - because that’s the best type of memorial we can make.
It’s disappointing and discouraging to tell your team that, even though they’ve been doing a killer job and have really
done nothing wrong, external to the project have changed, and we won’t be shipping this particular feature. It’s a good
feature. It’s a great feature. It just won’t work right now. It’s especially difficult to tell them this the first day
after a week (and, in at least one case, a weekend) of crunching; I have to be more communicative about how it really
isn’t due to the performance of the team, it’s just the external dependencies which have changed.
Hopefully, I can get something good for these guys; I think they were discouraged about this, and they deserve something
fun to do. That’s my task for the next few days, finding a fun project.
You know, one that doesn’t get axed.