~10 years here too, it's not so much corporate politics that bugs me, but the apparent futility of what I've done. I've had a number of assignments but it's all roughly the same - rebuild this existing thing over the span of two years, but this time in $technology.
It's often rebuild projects for rebuild's sake, and not because the old one is bad, but because the old one's developers are gone and nobody wants to invest the time and effort it takes to get to know the codebase.
~5 years ago I was probably at my most productive, churning out something like 5000 commits a year or thereabouts; thinking back, I realize that nobody in their right mind would even try to understand everything that I've built during that time.
Last year we were asked back to that customer again, this time to rebuild the application but in $new_tech_of_the_month. That really gave me a sinking feeling - like, I and my colleagues spent over 2.5 years on that application, and now it's just getting thrown away (we're talking >100 application screens here) because someone higher up decided Angular was no longer cool and everything had to be done in Polymer?
I mean if they had only properly maintained the application since I left. But nope, bumble along for 3 years and just toss the lot.
TL;DR, a lot of software is throwaway and effort is wasted.
Could be perhaps because Angular 1.x is not going to be maintained in the next 2 years so there are some security issues with that. And obviously, effort was not wasted since people used the application during those 2 years and you hopefully learned some stuff.
No code lasts forever. 2.5 years is a pretty good run for anything. If the company grew in that time, then they need to revisit all their processes including all those application screens. This sounds pretty normal.
I don't think the effort was wasted; you made money and hopefully had fun while doing it. The system was probably useful to the customer either directly or indirectly (by testing a hypothesis, for example).
It's often rebuild projects for rebuild's sake, and not because the old one is bad, but because the old one's developers are gone and nobody wants to invest the time and effort it takes to get to know the codebase.
~5 years ago I was probably at my most productive, churning out something like 5000 commits a year or thereabouts; thinking back, I realize that nobody in their right mind would even try to understand everything that I've built during that time.
Last year we were asked back to that customer again, this time to rebuild the application but in $new_tech_of_the_month. That really gave me a sinking feeling - like, I and my colleagues spent over 2.5 years on that application, and now it's just getting thrown away (we're talking >100 application screens here) because someone higher up decided Angular was no longer cool and everything had to be done in Polymer?
I mean if they had only properly maintained the application since I left. But nope, bumble along for 3 years and just toss the lot.
TL;DR, a lot of software is throwaway and effort is wasted.