A few years back, I was assigned to a new team and had to run some analysis on a selection of hardware that kept failing quality checks. Was told this was of the utmost importance to the product and that a future production push hinged on solving this problem. I was given a week. The scope of work would entail at least one really late night into the project.
On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a passing engineer from a different team stopped by my desk to chat. Saw my screen and said "neat Python code, what's it all for?"
I replied, "oh it's to do some number crunching on that quality problem."
To which he blandly goes: "Oh. Didn't you hear? We scrapped that entire product line 3 weeks ago."
Reader, I almost actually threw my keyboard off the desk.
(If there was ever an argument for in-office work, it's coworkers telling you to STOP working on something and rescuing you from situations like this...)
As useless as it feels, how you handled it, diving in with full focus to the point that you stayed up all night- you're working a muscle many engineers don't and you'll be better for it.
The muscle of doing pointless bullshit without understanding that it’s pointless… are you kidding? This has got to be the most troll comment I ever saw in this website.
It’s the muscle of being able to quickly orient yourself in sudden problems and drive towards useful solutions in a focused manner.
And to be fair, if the product line hadn’t been thrown out before I started, the project would have been useful in either A) fixing the product or B) providing justification to scrap the product line (probably the more likely outcome)
And I developed a nice tool that got used somewhere else later useful.
On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a passing engineer from a different team stopped by my desk to chat. Saw my screen and said "neat Python code, what's it all for?"
I replied, "oh it's to do some number crunching on that quality problem."
To which he blandly goes: "Oh. Didn't you hear? We scrapped that entire product line 3 weeks ago."
Reader, I almost actually threw my keyboard off the desk.
(If there was ever an argument for in-office work, it's coworkers telling you to STOP working on something and rescuing you from situations like this...)