[cableshaft]

Basically the same thing has happened to me at two different corporations as an employee, I worked on big projects for months that never saw the light of day, although I didn't know that would be the case ahead of time.

In one case the lead developer quit and the manager suddenly decided to scrap the project and hire a consultant firm to do the rest. In another I worked for six months on a project that would be 'the future of the department' they were going to sell to major companies, got it to a UAT state, showed it to the client, and the client dragged their feet on signing contracts for it for months, then they decided they were going to replicate it in-house, an oh, could you share all your business logic with us so we don't have to recreate it from scratch (thankfully our company told them to get fucked on that request).

It did seem nuts we were doing work without a signed contract, but apparently that's just how the healthcare industry works, if you waited until the contracts were signed you'd miss the open enrollment window for some of these, the most important time of the year for these things to be working, so the corporation I worked for (a large corporation) decided they needed to get a several month head start without a signed contract, and were overconfident it would eventually be signed.

That same corporation also had a project for some grand overhaul of their systems (and intended to unify several departments that all had their own systems, since they were originally bought and merged companies). We were one of the departments that were supposed to merge with that new software, and I know it still wasn't ready six years later (might have been scrapped, but I'm not sure).