I'm responsible for this software project at work. It's a big project, but I'm basically the only one working on it. There have been a lot of different things that needed to be figured out for it, a lot of which are outside of my expertise. So I've been pretty depressed and discouraged, trying to figure out the IT side, the networks side, the graphical side, the database side, the backend, etc. These past two weeks finally, I got the server up and running (which I had to write from scratch) and got a lot of the database code finally in place. I knew I would have to tell my boss the "good news" but didn't really want to because even though this project is a huge source of funding for the group--he just doesn't care. He's rarely interested in talking about the project in a constructive way. He's only interested some very specific parts of it, but at the same time, he's destructively meddlesome. And I also knew that no matter what, he'd tell me that the way I was doing things is wrong--that he wants the database to work like this, or the networks to work like this, etc.

Nevertheless, I brought it up, vaguely, to let him know where things stand and because I want to start incorporating more backend code. And suddenly out of nowhere, he starts talking about how maybe the whole thing should be reimplemented in python. And it's like--if he wanted python, he should have said that a year ago. Finally the database is sort of working and the socket programming is working and we've got the beginnings of our server, and out of nowhere, he thinks *maybe* things should be redone in python. The whole thing has been done in C++.

I told him we can reimplement sometime next year, but with a progress report deadline so close, we just can't start reimplementing right now. And he was fine with it. But I feel totally shattered. It just feels like in this group, there have been tons of people who do nothing. They don't even show up to work, or they come to the office but just goof off on the internet all day, and my boss lets them be. I already have zero confidence when it comes to this project. Facing it everyday is like a waking nightmare. Finally it felt like I'd made some real progress and maybe things would start looking up. But with his random desire to recode in python, it feels like all that work was pointless, and that I'd be in the exact same boat if I'd just been doing nothing all day.