A few years back, I interviewed with a company that specialized in air filtration products for hospitals and medical facilities. The company had grown rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and was gearing up to expand their facilities.

During my interview, I expressed skepticism in their long-term prospects -- I questioned whether the air filtration market would continue to grow in the post-COVID era... and they were very bullish about their outlook. Their argument was actually very convincing -- they were preparing to kick off development of a new product that was intended to address ongoing air filtration issues that were well known before COVID. Multiple American states were drafting legislation mandating the use of these products, so the market opportunity was immediate and growing.

After rejecting their initial offer, they raised the offer and I hesitantly accepted.

Shortly after joining, I set up a product data management system that worked really well, and the other engineers (even the grey-beard) quickly adopted it. I'm very proud of the work I did on that project, and it only took me 2 months to design and implement.

The next project ate up 2 years of my life. I was tasked with designing a medical smoke evacuator. Medical smoke evacuators had been around for almost 20 years at that point - there were numerous patents that were about to expire, so we didn't have to reinvent the wheel.

Our company founder had started his firm tinkering in a garage. He had no formal background in engineering or business management, and got lucky with the pandemic. As the company grew, he started spending ridiculous sums of money on a distributed sales and marketing team, many of whom he poached from competitors. On the engineering side, he converted multiple outside consultants into full-time employees.

Despite the incredible talent flowing into the company, our founder had no respect for the opinions of his employees. He had to have final say in all decisions, and his judgments always changed at the most inopportune time.

I built multiple functional prototypes of a benchtop smoke evacuator, each about the size of desktop computer. With some finishing touches, it could have been a hit. It worked really well.

Our founder shitcanned it, deciding that we needed to design an upright wheeled smoke evacuator instead. This ballooned the size and cost of the product - it had to be stable while supporting an articulating intake hose. Additionally, it had to have a huge touchscreen display, to show various air quality measurements (that very few customers actually needed). Lastly, it had to use a particular quiet (but somewhat underpowered) fan motor that he had already been ordered in large quantities.

At this point we only had 8 months left to develop a tradeshow-ready prototype. In the medical world, 2 years is not an uncommon development timeframe. So I worked my ass off.

Despite numerous obstacles (especially in wrangling with vendors and our electrical/software team), I managed to get a beautiful prototype ready and delivered to the tradeshow. Nestled among our older products, my product was the star of our show!

Post-tradeshow, I continued working on improving the design for production. I cranked out at least 60 drawings, got quotes from vendors, sent the quotes to our CFO for purchase approval. And waited. And waited. Weeks went by without action.

Behind the scenes, our company was starving for cashflow... the medical market was in a crunch, as hospitals had overspent during the pandemic. My interview market speculations a couple years prior had come true. Several members of our sales and marketing team were let go, along with one of my engineering coworkers. To stem the tide, our executives decided to go through another round of funding with our original investors. It was during this funding round that I found myself waiting for purchase orders to be sent.

Then we got our funding... in the worst way possible. The investing group got a majority share, and they moved immediately to push the founding CEO out (and who could blame them - the guy was a hack)! The consultants came in, hard questions got asked. And then a few days later my engineering VP told me that all NPD projects had been axed by the new CEO, including my smoke evacuator. My VP privately warned my team that we needed to start looking for... "other options".

A week later, I got laid off along with a coworker and our engineering VP. Just a couple weeks before I got married. Luckily, I got multiple interviews lined up in short order and was only unemployed for a short time.

So that was the most useless project I've ever worked on. Doomed from the start, despite my best efforts.