[erikpukinskis]

Must be strange to work on a huge technical project knowing your work will likely never be used and is there primarily to put pressure on someone else to lower their prices.

I guess you get paid, and can think of it like a hobby project for your own technical chops. But still.

[recursive]

This is my favorite kind of work, because there's no chance you'll ever get called by an irate customer.

[Nursie]

Been there, done that.

"Upper management want us to be able to offload burst capacity to AWS, MS, Google or other public provider, do what you can to make it work but I reckon in-house can beat them on pricing"

Six months later -

"Congrats, good work! We showed them, we're getting a new data centre!"

[stefco_]

A lot of people love working on more esoteric technical things and get more satisfaction from the intellectual component than its direct utility (I certainly feel this way about some things, though trans-architectural portability is not one of them). I would imagine this type of person is better-represented in this sort of field.

In addition, this kind of work does indirectly help keep Intel competitors viable, which helps keep Intel in check for everyone. Stuff like that is pretty exciting in its own way.

[erikpukinskis]

It’s an interesting concept to me. I do have a lot of “hobby work”, which is still meant to be used eventually. I just don’t apply a timeline, which enables me to focus on correctness.

Then I have my professional work, where the timeline is the primary focus, and correctness can only be pursued where it moves the timeline forward.

These projects you’re talking about are an interesting mixture. There is still a timeline that must be hit, because you need to do your demos, and you need to be ready to shift to a production timeline if negotiations go south. But since there are no customers the business model isn’t changing. And you don’t need to do any polish. So you can stay focused on the raw architectural problems.

It’s like my hobby projects in that you can focus on readiness over completeness, but there still is some timeline pressure.

Interesting to think about. Strange for me, but I guess it’s every day for others!

[drewg123]

Just imagine how nice a project is when you'd don't have to worry about supporting it for years.

[nkingsy]

Projects exist to expand revenue or cut costs. In my experience the revenue expansion ones are far more likely to “never be used”

[solotronics]

Tons of neat stuff gets built and then not used for a number of reasons (political, pricing, scaling, etc). It doesn't meant building it isn't worth it though.