Three years of my professional life, nights, weekends, cross-functional coordination across four countries, supplier relationships I personally built. The program got cancelled six weeks ago. I found out when an internal news alert went to my company email at the same time it went to the Wall Street Journal. My manager called me about 40 minutes later. I do not blame my manager. He found out the same way I did. I understand that EV business cases have changed and that the write-downs are real and that sometimes programs get cut. What I cannot get past is that nobody in this organization apparently felt that the people who spent years building the thing deserved to hear about it before the press did. I have been at this company for eleven years. I am genuinely uncertain how much longer that will be true.
April 29, 2026 - 21:37
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I went through almost…
I went through almost exactly this four years ago on a different program at a different company. The details are different but the 40 minute gap between the news alert and the manager phone call is something I recognized immediately when I read your post. What I remember most is not the anger, which came later, but this strange suspended feeling in the first few days where I kept showing up to meetings that technically no longer had a reason to exist and nobody knew how to talk about it. The work does not disappear from your head just because the program got cancelled. You spent three years building mental models and relationships and institutional knowledge around something and all of that is still there with nowhere to go. That part takes longer to process than people expect.
Large program cancellations…
Large program cancellations involve SEC disclosure timing, legal review, communications coordination across IR, PR and legal teams. The decision about when to notify the program team internally is made inside that same communications process and it almost always loses. It is a governance failure more than a malice story.
Something very similar…
Something very similar happened on our team two years ago. A platform decision got announced externally before the people running the workstreams were notified. What I noticed afterward was a specific kind of talent loss: not the loudest people, but the quiet ones who had been most invested and never complained. They just started updating their profiles. The company treated it as a business decision communicated through normal channels. Those people treated it as a signal about how they were valued. Those are two completely different conversations and the organization only had one of them.
This happened to me on a…
This happened to me on a different program at a different company and the part that took longest to process was not the cancellation itself. It was recalibrating how I understood the relationship. You operate for years with an implicit contract: your effort and commitment earn you some consideration. Finding out from a press release tells you clearly and permanently that the implicit contract is not real. That is actually useful information even though it is genuinely painful to receive. What I did with it was change how I think about what I owe the next program I work on and what I hold back for myself.
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