I once worked at an agency and was assigned to a project for a very big athletic shoe brand to create an app for a particular smart watch (no, not that one) to integrate with a run-tracking system they were building. We also built the mobile apps for it.

We got the whole thing done. They paid a lot more than $12k for it, plus whatever else they were spending.

After it was done, but before release, they bought another company that had the same stuff already, and scrapped the whole project.

I’d say 90+% of the development work I’ve done has never made anyone any money, and almost as much has never helped a single person. It’s a weird industry.

Had some experiences like this at big companies, and that's a main reason I now work at small startups.

They may not always survive the year, but everything I do matters to the company.

The app you built was a hedge against the scenario where the deal with the other company fell through. It may have not been used in the end, but it might have been used as a bargaining chip in the deal, and it definitely provided security to the business in the case that the purchase had fallen through.

I've worked on several projects that were experimental and built to validate business theories that turned out not to be true, and the projects were scrapped. Does that mean they were bullshit? No, it means the business learned something about the market with the experimental project that was never certain to begin with.

People think they have bullshit jobs because they can't see the forest for the trees, and because of that viral book & thinkpieces surrounding it -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless.

That's a dangerous thing to believe in a highly developed economy, frankly. And it's just wrong.

The perception matters for the worker, economy be damned, and sure, this may have had some value as you suggest—or it may have been an accident of poor coordination or internal politics and power games in the company. Tons of these things companies do aren’t for some good, rational reason. They’re just mistakes, or results of games run amok.

> Bullshit Jobs" -- that went around a few years ago (and that crops up again from time to time) and has convinced them that all labor without an immediate tangible effect is pointless.

The book version, at least, isn’t so simplistic or stupid.

My experience has been this: if a company is funded by venture capital, my work helped zero people. If it was private/bootstrapped, somebody used and was helped by what I did, and many times was a key factor in the success of a company.

> company spent $15M to develop a (free) mobile app, and after 3 years we have less than 10 users - and ZERO active users - and yet it keeps getting funded year after year for more enhancements and more millions of $$$

Perversely, I almost want to try working for a company where the pay is still good but the job has such low stakes. To know that there will never be a stressful fire drill in production because literally nobody uses what I make sounds almost... kind of great.

So weird that businesses are apparently totally cool with just shoveling money into a furnace like that, but hey, if I can be the guy pocketing a few bucks as the rest of it goes into the furnace... not such a bad deal.