At some point you will spend months on something that never ships. The priority moves, the customer walks, the company reorganises, and eight months of your work goes into an archived repository nobody opens again.
It feels like theft. It is not, but you have to do something deliberate or it will actually cost you.
Here is the trap. When the project dies, most people go quiet about it. It never appears in a review, a CV, or an interview answer, because the honest sentence sounds like an admission: I worked on a thing that got cancelled. So the year disappears from your own record of yourself, and you carry a vague sense of having lost time.
Separate two things that are easy to confuse. The outcome was cancelled. The work was not undone.
You made decisions under real constraints. You learned a domain, or a system, or a way of running a project. You found out how your organisation actually decides things, which is knowledge you cannot get any other way. You may well have learned more from the wreck than you would have from a smooth delivery, because failures show you the joints.
So write it down while it is fresh, in the week it ends rather than the year you need it. Three paragraphs. What we were trying to do and why it mattered. What I personally built or decided. Why it stopped, in a sentence you could say out loud in front of the person who stopped it.
That last part is what turns a dead project into a good interview answer. Nobody in a hiring conversation minds cancelled work. Everybody minds a person who cannot say what they learned from it or who sounds bitter about it. Being able to describe a shutdown clearly and without blame reads as maturity, and it is genuinely rare.
Then look for the parts that are still alive. The library you extracted, the test harness, the document that explained a gnarly integration. Move them somewhere they will outlive the project.
The delivered work builds your record. The cancelled work usually built you.
– Asael Shinder
