Tell HN: I like lost causes (companies)

I've been working for a tech company for the last year doing stuff that I would consider are "lost causes", this is, we work on products that upper management wants us to work on, but that in reality have little impact and little usage in production mainly because the company is losing customers (and burning money like there is no tomorrow). And I like it. This is why:

- plenty of time for development: because deadlines are not hard ones (so we have been pushing them for quite a while). So, there is no much rush. Quite a relaxed working environment. Management seems to feel like there is no point in pushing more since the company is actually going south

- plenty of time for learning. Because sometimes some sprints do not have much work to be done, so I spent my time improving my skills (e.g., AWS, Go, Postgres, K8s, DDD, etc.) and getting ready for any potential new job I may jump in (e.g., doing leetcode a couple of times per week or so). I have read a lot of interesting tech books and watched tons of tech conferences on YT

- bugs in production do not happen... at all. I don't mean we write perfect software, but since the usage of our software is so low, executing edge cases besides the normal flow doesn't happen, so bugs are not discovered. Besides, even if a bug happens in prod, it's nothing that cannot be solved the next morning

- plenty of time to improve our systems "as per the book". This is, since we have lots of time we do stuff like improving our infrastructure monitoring, performance, SLA, SLO, refactoring following DDD, decoupling of microservices using async techniques (e.g., Kafka + debezium). This is nice because I get to learn a lot "in a safe environment" (this is, an environment we can actually break and nothing happens). True to be told, this costs money, so it's not the most efficient way of working since the company is burning money. I've told this to our managers (yes, we have two!) and they actually didn't care

In summary, I think I love to work on stuff like this. It's like working on personal projects: all the fun stuff minus the stressing parts (on-call, deadlines, extra hours) plus decent money.

The only problem is, most likely the company will cease to exist in 1 year (by my calculations, in 8 months). So, I'm preparing my exit soon. I'll probably try to find another company that is going down, hopefully I can join their "good last months", but that's tricky.

Compared to my previous job (a normal company making money pushing features every week), this is heaven: in my previous job I was so stressed and I didn't have time to learn anything exciting. It was all the time: moving Jira tickets to Done, fixing bugs, and meetings. I don't want to do that again. I wrote dozens of endpoints, but it was all the same boring stuff.