[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have wo...
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Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
If you're feeling useless, remember that I exist. Let me give you
some context. I work in the pipeline automation department of a
company. Last month, our team decided to deprecate an internal tool
due to several maintenance issues. So we created a pipeline that
automates the implementation of this legacy tool, in case other
teams needed to use it. (WHAT???) This month, a guy in my team
found some improvement scenarios in the automation. So I was chosen
to implement this changes in this legacy internal tool. The thing
is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull requests are not
getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this
guy in my team. Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even
more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios. But this same week,
my TL sent notices to all the other teams informing them that this
internal tool has been deprecated and they should no longer use it.
So what sense does it make to have a pipeline automation that
implements the use of the deprecated tool? And if it has been
deprecated, why would I need to make an adjustment for the
automation to be even resilient if no one should be able to use it
anymore? So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of
time like it? (WTF???) This makes me wonder, how many people have
to work on something that they see no sense in doing at all. So
once again, if you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.
Author : panqueca
Score : 231 points
Date : 2024-04-05 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| It's never useless. You'll not be dumber afterwards. See as
| additional skill and it looks good on your resume "did that, got
| this"
|
| It's all a matter of selling it with perspective :)
| ac2u wrote:
| Maybe 13 years ago when I was a fresh and inexperienced dev in my
| first job, I was once asked to work on a C# side project at work
| where people could run common dev workflows (think running
| database migrations, deployments etc) by specifying them as XML
| instead of scripts.
|
| I had fun, eventually they wanted things like conditional
| workflows which I had to think how to model in XML.
|
| To anyone with even a bit of experience, they can tell that it
| wasn't long until this not-invented-here-driven-monstrosity of an
| idea was abandoned as it's not something you can do as a couple
| of hours per week side project and have it be massively useful in
| a short timeframe.
|
| So it was a useless effort for the company, but as a very
| inexperienced dev, it was the first project where afterwards
| explanations of how things like lisp worked started to make sense
| to me intuitively considering how backwards I was in my naive
| attempts.
|
| Even the project you're describing, learn to be ok with looking
| back on parts of your career and being thankful that only your
| employers money was being burned on "useless" things while you
| were taking forward the valuable lessons.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I (as well as a few others on the team) spent six months working
| on a new web app that my company had decided would be the future
| of the department (my boss said those exact words to me), and
| that they'd sell to two different major clients (one was a major
| pharmacy and another was a major health insurance company. You've
| almost certainly heard of them).
|
| We already had them as clients for other services we provided,
| this was just something new that the higher ups were sure they'd
| go for (I think it solved a real need of theirs, their call
| center people were doing a lot of looking things up manually
| across like 60 excel spreadsheets during calls, IIRC, and part of
| what this did was combine all that data into a central area
| that's easily searchable, plus some other nice-to-have call
| center features like being to schedule appointments or something,
| I think).
|
| We got a nearly production-ready MVP in front of them and demo'd
| it, they seemed interested but we could never get them to sign a
| contract, for months. One of them eventually decided to recreate
| something similar in-house and actually had the gall to request
| that we send them all the business logic we came up with while
| doing it (for free), the other just never signed a contract.
|
| Well anyway, after failing to get those two clients, the execs
| must have decided that it was no longer the future of the
| department, and was quietly shelved.
|
| I might as well not have done anything that six months. Although
| I did get a bit more comfortable with using Angular at the time,
| thanks to that project.
|
| That company did that multiple times, btw. Because of the nature
| of the health industry, and how often they drag their heels for
| contracts, they often decided they had to start work without a
| contract in place or else wouldn't have it ready by the annual
| health insurance open enrollment period, which is when health
| insurance companies were busiest and where companies that offered
| services to those companies (our company) made all of their money
| (think of it kind of like how game companies don't want to miss
| the holiday season for their new releases). But it resulted in
| them doing work and not getting paid for it. I wasn't surprised
| to find out the department was eventually shut down a few years
| after I quit.
| keepamovin wrote:
| This is hilariously written, thank you.
|
| I'm still under the mistaken impression that I'm useful so I
| can't provide any examples.
| resource_waste wrote:
| Trying to find the coolest print-in-place 3d printed toys.
|
| Last year I gave customized fidget cubes for christmas, they were
| so popular I ended up getting requests for them.
|
| Looking for something similar, the tri-color filaments make me
| want to re-do everything to see how it appears differently.
| globalise83 wrote:
| The big question is: have you clearly pointed out to your team
| lead that the business value of you working on this project is
| actually negative given the opportunity cost? Or did you just
| accept being assigned the ticket without providing any push-back?
| mtmail wrote:
| Friend of mine worked through 400 pages of specifications for a
| big pharma software (lots of Java, CRUD, microservices). The
| project started late, it took longer than expected and by middle
| of the project they learned the client already migrated to
| another software.
|
| So the team had continue for several months to fulfill the
| catalogue of specifications, pass (external) QA and already knew
| the software will never be used.
|
| He said it was all custom and exclusive and couldn't be reused or
| sold to another client.
| donatj wrote:
| I have spent sixteen years working on a note keeping app that
| only I use.
|
| I even took the registration page down after GDPR out of an
| abundance of caution.
|
| I use it every day and really like it, but every time I have
| shown it to a friend they just shrug
| frfl wrote:
| But that is useful. You use it everyday, that counts.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| 100% happy user base is really something to be proud of.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| One of Parkinson's essays (of Parkinson's Law fame) is full of
| stories of things that are "perfected" only after they stop being
| used.
|
| Although ancient, his essays are still useful in today's world...
|
| https://archive.org/details/parkinsonslawoth0000park_f7z9
|
| Short, funny, and inciteful
| ghaff wrote:
| The Parkinson's Law aphorism departs a bit from his original
| point though both are totally valid. It's pretty amazing how
| applicable so many of his essays still are. They mostly don't
| seem dated at all. See bikeshedding.
| rhelz wrote:
| Classic warning sign of impending layoffs. Word to the wise.
| thatguyagain wrote:
| I'm trying to think of a single actually useful thing I ever
| worked on..
| gonzo41 wrote:
| You have worked on earning money to live in your world. Good
| job. Don't over think work.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is the right attitude. Unless you own the business, you
| have no moral responsibility to ensure the projects you work
| on have a purpose. You can, of course, optionally choose to
| not work on projects you believe have a _bad_ or _evil_
| purpose. I 've quit jobs where I though the project was evil.
|
| You're writing the code, or producing the documentation,
| managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your
| role is, and in exchange your company is paying you money.
| That's the bottom line. If you think it's a useless project,
| then you should be even doubly grateful that a company exists
| that will pay you your (presumably good) salary to create
| something useless! I worked on a totally useless project in
| the past, a lot like some of the comments here describe, and
| I went into work every day thanking the stars that my company
| was stupid enough to pay me to do this!
| sfpotter wrote:
| Lucky for you to have the privilege to protest quit from
| moral outrage. Not everyone is so lucky (in fact, most
| people aren't).
| ragnese wrote:
| Sure, but did the parent comment say otherwise? This
| feels like a combative reply.
| icedchai wrote:
| I hate useless, pointless work, even if I'm getting paid
| for it. Don't you want to build things that actually get
| used?
| datavirtue wrote:
| This. I sit down the hall from the CEO of our company. I
| hear nearly every meeting and conversation that goes on.
| Don't think for a minute that most CEOs aren't scrounging
| money from useless bullshit circumstances half the time.
| They are very pragmatic and just really don't give a fuck
| where the money comes from.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| I don't think there's anything wrong with also wanting the
| work you do to have a positive impact in the world. Whether
| it helps people, entertains them, or saves them time it feels
| great to get paid and also make a difference. Some may not be
| happy with just wanting a paycheque and that's OK too.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I program because I could do nothing else. I do it because it
| is the thing I most want to do with any given moment. The
| fact they pay me to do it is fortunate otherwise I would be
| homeless and programming in a shelter somewhere. I over think
| work simply because the aspect of "work" is entirely
| incidental to what I do out of passion.
|
| That said, I also never believe anything I do is useful and
| that also isn't why I do what I do.
| jrockway wrote:
| I do the programming for free. Taking the annual leadership
| impact and cybersecurity training survey is what they pay
| me for.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The only reason to give a damn about what you're working on
| is to make sure you're accumulating good bullet points for
| your resume.
| sfpotter wrote:
| There are actually companies to work for where you can get
| involved and develop ownership over things, and where how
| well you do relates to the success of the business. If you
| have a good relationship with your coworkers, you may even
| want to do a good job to try to maximize the likelihood
| that not just you keep putting bread on the table but they
| do, too! Crazier things have happened.
| blharr wrote:
| Good to know I'm not the only one...
| gr8r wrote:
| who else came looking for a comment like this...
| fatnoah wrote:
| My very first full-time job was to adapt a COTS ATM protocol
| stack to run on embedded devices to power a truck & satellite
| network. The deadline was 1 year to get the stack running on the
| hardware, and would be the first of 4 annual milestones related
| to the project. After about 6 months, I was mostly done the work
| when I found out that the project was moving to a single release
| at the 4 year mark.
|
| Ok, not so bad, except that the scope of my task remained the
| same. The project and my role was funded by the customer for the
| 4 years, but my deliverable remained the same. My job was to
| literally do nothing while being available to debug things if
| needed.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Great time to spend on whatever you want to learn about.
| pjdesno wrote:
| Started my career on ATM. Good way to develop an enduring
| cynicism about industry hype.
| OnACoffeeBreak wrote:
| In a previous career as a hardware engineer, I spent two and a
| half years leading three different projects that ended up being
| cancelled because marketing realized that they couldn't sell
| them. These were line cards for an early (2002) racked IP-based
| DSLAM.
|
| Memory is hazy, and I may get some of this wrong because I left
| the industry a while back.
|
| One was a multi-port T1/E1 interface card that provided -48V line
| power to downstream repeaters or CPE. Think PoE but over T1/E1
| interfaces at telco voltages and ruggedized to sit in an outdoor
| metal cabinet with no fans. All components were rated -40C to
| +85C. I am glad it was cancelled. It was going to be a safety and
| regulatory certification nightmare.
|
| Another was a multi-port DS3 interface card that did circuit
| emulation over Ethernet. There were no off-the-shelf ICs that
| could do everything they wanted. So, we ended up with 4 very
| expensive FPGAs on the board. This one went into second prototype
| stage before being cancelled. I'd guess, $200k spent just on
| prototype hardware.
|
| I can't remember the third project. At that stage I was jokingly
| known as some sort of project killer.
| woleium wrote:
| i imagine 200k was peanuts compared to the cost of design and
| implementation. People are expensive!
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient
| in complete unlikely scenarios.
|
| Hmmm. I don't know the details here but I have seen some junior
| devs say "that's never going to happen" as a way of justifying
| fragile code. And sure, maybe _that_ thing is never going to
| happen. But if you carry on like that you 'll end up with 1000
| things that are "never going to happen", and then you'll realise
| that this guy was actually right.
|
| > So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time
| like it?
|
| Maybe ask your boss instead of us...
| azhenley wrote:
| My old post is relevant here, "Why I prefer making useless
| stuff". Which is very different than working on useless stuff at
| work!
|
| https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html
| sspiff wrote:
| Did you ever make that typed lisp compiler? Asking for a
| friend.
| theihor wrote:
| What are you saying? Making another lisp is useless?!
| octokatt wrote:
| I appreciate how making useless stuff is fun as a hobby, and
| enjoying that play is important. Even crows enjoy their sleds
| [0], that's how important play is.
|
| Needing to complete a project for the sake of your continued
| survival/paycheck, while adhering to specific criteria, is very
| much the opposite experience. A study done where _people were
| paid to put together Lego sets_ put together less of them when
| they had to watch the researcher take them apart immediately
| afterwards, despite intrinsically enjoying Legos [1].
|
| [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnI4dhZZxQ [1]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...
| kn100 wrote:
| I'm trying to teach myself how to sniff and interact with i2c
| hardware on consumer products. I'm doing this by attempting to
| connect my standing desk to the internet. Literally the whole
| goal is to have a "make desk go up" and "make desk go down"
| button in my Home Assistant.
|
| The real goal is learning to sniff i2c though.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| This is actually the most useful thing I've read in this whole
| comment section so far.
|
| Thank you for reverse-engineering proprietary hardware and
| writing integration drivers for it. The world needs people like
| you.
| Havoc wrote:
| Something like buspirate might work
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| That's far from useless though. There have been times where
| I've wished that I had an I2C expert so I could say "this thing
| is acting weird. Here's a bus analyzer and there's the code. Go
| fix it."
| ghaff wrote:
| There's definitely a difference between the utility of the
| final project/product and the utility to you personally based
| on what you learned/had fun with/got paid for along the way.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Very good point!
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yeah, that's like... the polar opposite of this post.
| Frankly, that sounds both fun and useful.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Long ago I wrote an FPGA image to convert I2C to serial for
| long-term logging, to catch that rare, once a week event:
|
| https://github.com/jhallen/i2cmon
|
| You capture the serial using minicom log to file or similar,
| then you can peruse the log at your leisure.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| At prevJob when we were in early stage I remember building a ton
| of features from the ground up which were useful to our end
| users.
|
| Post IPO all the late stage jokers from companies like MSFT and
| AMZN started coming in and I remember the torturous bike shedding
| and endless documentation for doing simple stupid shit like
| adding a single attribute to a data model or changing border
| radius on a button for the design system.
|
| Added literally no value for the users.
|
| Actual user issues were deemed "not important" because they were
| a bit complex or some PM with the right credentials but none of
| the empathy would think it's low priority.
|
| Not to mention the endless self patting on the back and
| "psychological safety" type people who showed up that spent more
| time doing everything but the work.
|
| Meanwhile our poor users would suffer in their already difficult
| jobs and get an unwanted UX redesign instead.
|
| Honestly made me lose respect for FANG crowd. I'll rather work at
| startups or my own company than work at some late stage place.
| What a nightmare.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time
| like it?
|
| When this happens, look at the money. Who is paying for it, how
| are they paying for it, and can the money be used for other
| projects/programs.
|
| I've been in similar situations where work had to be done on X
| even though there was little work to do or no point, but there
| was money. Y had more value, if we could work on it. It was
| funded from a different source which didn't have money (or did,
| but not enough to bring us over) and we couldn't use money from X
| to support Y.
|
| It's a very frustrating situation, fortunately not one I'm in
| anymore.
| wpietri wrote:
| Definitely look at money, but also look at social power. Humans
| are primates, and primates have meticulously maintained status
| hierarchies. Actions driven by that may not "make sense".
| "Sense" came way later and it's still trying to catch up.
|
| And one general rule I love here is POSIWID:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
|
| If you can set aside the nominal purpose of the system for a
| bit, you can start to see a lot of the machinery underneath.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| How much other work does your team have to do? Is it possible
| that things are slow, so you've been assigned to something so
| your TL or manager can show what you're working on instead of
| saying "panqueca is just sitting around doing nothing right now?"
| pizlonator wrote:
| I'm making a super slow version of C that is totally memory safe.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gij9UQy_JEQ&feature=youtu.be
|
| It's so slow lmao. 200x right now. But I can run curl and ssh so
| that's something.
| exe34 wrote:
| Anything you can learn from it? Anything you'd like to try, now
| that there's no consequences? Can you spin it for LinkedIn karma?
| dandanana wrote:
| About 10 years ago I worked under a video game project that was
| ongoing for 2-3 years before I joined. It is still in progress as
| far as I know. So more than a decade of development if you add
| the time I worked there
|
| It is a very successful gaming company and released a couple
| games that sold very well. But the game project I was working on
| was basically a side-gig that no one (other than the owner of the
| company) cares about. It was like it was his hobby project and he
| was paying us to develop it. I think it was a good game and could
| have been successful but it was horribly mismanaged
| brynet wrote:
| chatgpt(8). It's pretty useless.
|
| https://brynet.ca/chatgpt/
| Havoc wrote:
| Did an internship once where they had me dig through a massive
| shared drive and map it out in an attempt to trim unused bits.
| Doubt it was ever used.
|
| Also wrote some Visual Basic Code that I'm 100% dead certain was
| never used. Which was probably for the better
| corytheboyd wrote:
| It doesn't take long for the left hand to not know what the right
| hand is doing, or even that there is another hand out there doing
| hand things. It's hard to completely not care, but detaching from
| it to a reasonable degree is the only way to keep going in this
| career for the long haul, because you will repeatedly be asked to
| do seemingly dumb things. It's on someone else's dollar, if they
| want dumb thing give them dumb thing, and sleep soundly at night
| knowing that you were paid pretty well to do it.
|
| Sometimes you have a voice in the room to prevent dumb things
| from being done. Use it if you have it, by all means. If you
| don't get heard it's a waste of time and mental health.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| As an analyst, I've worked on my fair share of projects that have
| never seen the light of day, and essentially just ended up in a
| black hole.
|
| A scenario like that typically goes like this:
|
| - Client orders an analysis of something. They want all corners
| covered, and because they'll use it as evidence/argument/pitch or
| whatever, you're likely working on a tight deadline.
|
| - You (and others) work tirelessly through the nights, pour
| hundreds of hours into the analysis, do get it finished before
| deadline. Everything needs to be perfect and bullet-proof.
|
| - Client is presented with the delivery, skims through it, and
| thanks you for the work.
|
| - The client changes their mind / abandons it all-together.
|
| Those projects rarely feel rewarding, as you're mostly just
| fighting the clock, and doing lots of boring routine work. And
| when it turns out that you and your team are the only ones that
| will ever read the analysis, that kind of just makes it feel
| useless.
| ghaff wrote:
| I once spent months working on an expert witness report for a
| high profile tech industry trial--one of 10 or so written for
| "our" side. Never got used because of some things that happened
| in the course of the lawsuit.
|
| It was a nice change of pace, paid well, and was able to reuse
| snippets of material here and there over the years, so not
| totally useless but never got used for its intended purpose.
|
| Of course, I've also been on projects that were just canceled.
| mamcx wrote:
| One of my major tricks is to just wait before doing things. And
| ask If doing this should be done instead of that.
|
| this helps to eliminate greatly this scenario.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Typical Wally! (from Dilbert)
| massysett wrote:
| As a manager, when this happens I tell my staff that the
| sleeping firefighter performs valuable work.
|
| Sometimes management decides it's worth it to spend staff time
| on something even though there's a non-zero probability it will
| never be used. If there's no fire during the firefighter's
| shift, we don't conclude her time was wasted and that we should
| never have had the firefighter.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| The work required to improve it now is much, much less than the
| work required to improve it later. Let's say it is 50x easier
| now.
|
| We know that old tools get reused sometimes. Let's say it is 1/3
| of the time.
|
| It's a very good expenditure of resources to update this tool
| now, especially since no pipelines will blow up in real time if
| errors are made.
|
| It is also possible your boss is testing you. Deciding this is a
| easte of your time is a good way to get fired.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Have recently become a Gnus convert, and inspired by a few of
| these libraries, I have begun to figure out implementing a
| Bluesky/atproto backend for it.
|
| Not quite useless, (if it works out) it will probably be of
| interest to two or three other people.
|
| 1. https://gitawonk.com/dickmao/nnhackernews 2.
| https://gitawonk.com/dickmao/nntwitter
| tinycombinator wrote:
| I always have situations like these in the back of my mind when
| people try to justify their salaries, their self worth, by
| arguing they bring value to the world and those who make less
| don't.
|
| (Not saying everyone doesn't genuinely contribute to the world,
| but moreso a propagation of a toxic, externally-based-worth
| mindset.)
| charles_f wrote:
| You need to support services that are getting deprecated until
| the very last user leaves. And believe ne, sometimes it might
| take several years more than the company would like to. As long
| as someone is using it, you're contributing to its stability, and
| it's not useless. See yourself as the orchestra on the titanic,
| playing to the best of their craft until the ship goes under.
|
| I worked for a full year on a service who was used by exactly 0
| people. Then had to do all the consequent security updates and
| such. It took another 2y until we were finally shutting
| everything down. That was useless.
| tetha wrote:
| This is indeed something my opinion shifted in the last 2
| years. Some of my superiors hate it, but they are kinda getting
| it after some patience.
|
| The thing is: Slowly deprecating a service doesn't work. At
| least on my patience level, which is measured in years. I don't
| have decade level patience available.
|
| If you announce that a service is being decommissioned, the
| good teams leave across some time. This time can be a month, a
| year but they leave. It will take longer than expected, but the
| good teams move and scurry and make it work. Those are the good
| teams, they cooperate constructively and the migrations work.
|
| But the other teams just don't.
|
| And there is nothing else to say about it. They don't. And you
| can't take it away because there's C-Level support behind those
| bad teams. So you can't take it away, or else high management
| comes around asking questions and being pushy.
|
| To me it seems like you either invest the necessary amount of
| energy to maintain a service, or you invest energy to actively
| kill that service. There is no tolerating, there is no "low-
| effort maintenance". Tell the next CVE > 8 in that service it's
| "low effort maintenance" and kindly ask the attackers to not
| attack that service because it's "maintenance".
|
| Either this is a service we offer, or we actively work on
| migrating things off of it.
| ramses0 wrote:
| "Change Adoption Curve" - search for some images.
|
| I talked with a few infra-ish people at Facebook once upon a
| time, and they described effectively a "Service Assassination
| Team". ImageResizer1.0, ImageResizer9000, they were an actual
| funded team to hunt down and destroy (and presumably help
| migrate) people using ImageResizer1.0 (or whatever).
|
| It seemed that was a very forward-thinking way of looking at
| things to prevent an eventual "big-ball-of-mud" pile of
| services.
|
| Either that, or Bezos's insight that internal teams should
| have an API-charge, and each team had a budget for requests
| between systems. If you're on ImageResizer1.0, and the costs
| go up 10x or 1000x, you're instantly motivated to go and
| search for the recommended new alternative, or eat the
| increased API cost (which can then be directed to the
| "Service Assassination Team...")
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yep, focusing on automation and reliability for this being-
| deprecated thing seems useful. The goal is to increase the
| likelihood that it will keep running until people actually stop
| using it, without anybody needing to work on it. That's useful!
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I developed a small bankroll/gambling simulator in Golang.
|
| Ended up thinking I "figured out" roulette and I'm down about 2k.
| This isn't a lot of money for me, but I think I'm done with
| gambling for a while.
|
| Ultimately just take whatever you feel like gambling, bet it on
| black and leave regardless of the outcome. That'll yield you
| better results than any system.
|
| I'm not open sourcing the code since I don't want someone else to
| lose money using it.
|
| It was really fun to learn Golang though. I also had some fun
| with setting up a build pipeline for the mobile app. I guess I
| really spent 2k to learn Golang...
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Unless you're calculating your actuals vs expected variance you
| don't know if you're right or just unlucky.
|
| I've known pro poker players who were down $80k and new from
| their hands they were just unlucky and to keep going.
| Eventually made more as a player than many FAANG SWEs do.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Billionair Jeffrey Yass is famous for getting his start from
| gambling:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/06/how-trad...
|
| He's invested in TikTok, recently visited Mar-a-Lago, now
| suddenly Trump is against the TikTok ban. Getting off tanget,
| but the Palentir billionairs are anti-TikTok for some reason..
| we'll see how the fight goes..
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| The 3rd rewrite of the same application because someone above me
| in the chain decided we needed to have AppX but on PlatformY ,
| with just slightly changed requirements such that we cannot
| simply copy and paste it over.
| whinvik wrote:
| I worked at a place for a few months where they had this very
| complicated K8s, Argo Workflows architecture for processing some
| Bioinformatics data. Felt cool when I joined, but it clearly was
| way over-engineered.
|
| I started with a proposal on how to simplify it and went about
| developing a POC. However, a couple of months in, I realized that
| the company actually had NO customers for this. And multiple
| engineers had worked multiple years to get this to the stage it
| was. I had 0 motivation to do anything after this, and left soon
| afterwards. I think they are still working on it!
| sanderjd wrote:
| What was your proposal?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I worked for a company that used to resell a single-board
| computer used for control applications. The vendor was getting
| antsy because we were always late paying our bills.
|
| Our company owner didn't like their complaints, so I was told to
| design one that was "better than theirs." That's it. That was the
| _entire_ spec. OK, I was also told that customer X would like a
| board that they can program in C (current board had a built-in
| BASIC interpreter).
|
| I pointed out that I didn't think it would be helpful, since
| every customer was happy with what we had, and no one was coming
| close to its limits. It was a small company: I took most of the
| customer tech support calls, so I was plugged into what they were
| doing.
|
| I was told to go do it anyway, "we're not going to be held
| hostage by those guys."
|
| So, I did. I picked a cool new 16-bit Hitachi (now Renesas) chip
| that had a nice C cross-compiler available and set off on my pet
| project. My design had more RAM and more storage and a much
| faster clock. I wrote a simple text-based serial monitor for
| debugging and uploading code. It was really nice.
|
| As I predicted, however, it didn't sell a single unit. No one
| cared about all the stuff I added since the existing board
| already had far more capability than anyone needed anyway and
| this one, along with the necessary compiler, cost more than 5x
| the old one.
|
| They showed it to customer X, who said "it's cool, but why would
| you think we need this?"
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Wouldn't "better than theirs" then mean cheaper while still
| being sufficient?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Perhaps. This is why specifications should be unambiguous.
| secondcoming wrote:
| > That was the entire spec
|
| To be fair, that's how most ideas start off. Your boss gave to
| free reign over a new project. You should have been happier
| than you seemed.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Oh, I loved the project. I was acutely aware that it was a
| complete waste of money, but I knew that I worked for idiots
| and I rode that train all the way until it finally derailed.
|
| I just wish that I was able to get all the stuff out of there
| that they promised me before the Sheriff locked the doors!
| tstrimple wrote:
| At one point I was working for a large international ag company
| helping them expand their mobile offering in other countries. We
| had working native apps in the US that were well tested and well
| received by customers. So the obvious choice was to take the
| steps needed to internationalize that code so it could be
| deployed in more regions. Instead we had to run with the fully
| custom implementation that the other country's team had already
| started building. And by started building I mean they had a few
| Ionic pages created that didn't even have full functionality.
| Everyone agreed that scrapping that project and just leveraging
| the existing code base was the right way to go. Yet that's not
| what we did. We continued to build on the much worse app for
| months knowing it was just going to be replaced anyway. One of
| the most depressing roles I've been in.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Don't stress about it. This is how this industry works. If your
| work isn't immediately useless, it will be soon enough when it is
| abandoned in favor of the next programming language or framework
| that is the new hotness.
|
| Or, a new manager or exec somewhere up the chain decides to
| change a business process while you're still working on
| implementing support for the previous process. It happens all the
| time.
|
| I would guess that 90% of the code I've ever written isn't used
| at all today, if it ever was. And that's being generous.
| evandale wrote:
| I've been in the exact same scenario twice and what I've learned
| is that internal tools (especially in big companies) only get
| "deprecated" but it's hard to abandon them completely.
|
| I've found the decision to "deprecate" tools, especially long
| established ones, comes along with political shenanigans and
| especially so when the tool is used by multiple teams with
| competing interests. One team usually can yell louder than all
| the other teams and force the new tool to be very specific to
| their workflow, but because other teams have different workflows
| the new tool won't work for them. So you're in this limbo of
| supporting both forever until everyone can agree to switch to the
| new tool or someone important enough decides to completely turn
| off the deprecated tool.
| convivialdingo wrote:
| A few years back, I worked at a startup that got a contract with
| a major software company.
|
| Our job was to implement a crypto storage system for an OSS
| database where each user only had access to data based on their
| own authentication keys. Only minimal changes to the DB allowed,
| so we made our own PAM module to handle the authentication and
| key management.
|
| We implemented a POSIX layer that intercepted file ops and
| backing-stored and encrypted the blocks into S3 containers.
| Files/blocks that got purged would automatically pull from S3.
|
| One month into the project the major software company decided
| they didn't want it. But we still had the contract and had to
| fulfill it for six more months.
|
| So yeah, six months of code in the trash. But I learned a lot of
| S3, AWS and wrote a toy compiler with the spare time. Since
| nobody cared I was able to try a lot of new solutions, test out
| different languages and tools. Basically experimented with
| everything out there.
|
| Delivered my code on the day of the deadline. Tested, worked,
| archived.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| A document management system running on CDC mainframes. In 1991.
| It had a fixed schema. The officially approved extension language
| was Fortran. It did not have record locking.
|
| I was doing some user interface app. Absolutely hopeless. Burning
| money after blowing your nose in it.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I'm a programmer. All my work is ultimately, at best, useless.
|
| That's one of the most important lessons any good programmer
| learns at some point. We aren't building monuments in software,
| everything we do is disposable and will eventually be someone
| else's curse in the future.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Our work products are disposable, but there's still a
| difference in what our projects do over the course of their
| life. They could be a net positive, neutral, or harmful to
| society, or they might just be dead on arrival and never see
| the light of day after months of work.
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| You may be getting fired soon, just fyi
| cosmotic wrote:
| I along with tens of other consultants were flown from around the
| US to the bay area and back once a week and put up in a hotel and
| given a rental car - to work on a project for 3 months. It turns
| out, the project was canceled before my first day, the leadership
| just didn't tell anyone because they feared backlash from users
| that were promised the new features.
|
| The project itself was a mess. There were GUID-named Visual
| Studio solutions for every combination of values of three
| variables; hundreds of solutions that grew every month. The
| output of these projects was a spreadsheet that was then
| _manually_ compared to the previous months ' output.
|
| This was all lead and managed by one of the top consulting firms
| in the US.
| leiradel wrote:
| I was a new hire at a game development company. My first task was
| to optimize a function that was consuming more cycles than all
| the other ones. The function was responsible for dispatching
| Objective-C++ method calls.
|
| After a quick debug session, the problem was clear: the methods
| to call was being searched using a linear search. I changed the
| search to use a hashtable and the function disappeared from the
| list of most CPU consuming functions.
|
| After running both implementations for a couple of weeks to make
| sure my implementation was right, I made a PR, which wasn't
| approved. The manager said my change was too risky to go to
| production, even though the implementation was simple and I spent
| two weeks making sure it was ok. They're probably still using the
| linear search.
| happyweasel wrote:
| I hope you ran away from that company. Your change was too
| disruptive, because it made other people look stupid, like they
| didn't grok basic data structures. I think everyone overlooks
| obvious solutions to everyday problems every now and then, but
| the way they reacted speaks volumes...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Oh wow, I had a virtually identical experience.
|
| I was a junior programmer helping out with a Java applet game
| that ran in the browser. It had performance issues, which I
| narrowed down to a "ticker tape" text animation. The position
| of the text in pixels was being updated by a background thread,
| and that thread would leak each time when the user switched
| screens. If you clicked around enough there would be hundreds
| of threads all updating the same shared variable.
|
| I replaced a thousand lines of that nonsense with a single line
| of code: return getTicks() * velocity %
| tickerWidth;
|
| It looked identical except that now there weren't any threads
| used and the animation was silky smooth.
|
| I got in trouble for "making a mess". The developer responsible
| for the previous code had been busy (for weeks!) "fixing" this
| code and couldn't merge his change. So it got reverted and they
| spent another month tuning the threaded code for better
| performance.
|
| I waited until they got distracted and gave up, then re-merged
| my one-liner. They were convinced they had "fixed it" and never
| looked at that code again.
|
| The responsible coder got a pat on the back for his hard work
| and I got a disciplinary meeting to discuss my "behaviour".
|
| This was at a startup that burned through ten million dollars
| and then was shuttered because the software was basically
| garbage and couldn't be sold to anyone.
| Sevii wrote:
| Worked on a video licensing project for a cable company for six
| months, canceled after a merger. Worked on a tool for consulting
| companies to track their engineers expertise, canceled after I
| left. Worked on a voice assistant, canceled after ChatGPT came
| out.
|
| There are a lot of dead ends in software. You get over it after
| awhile, just keep coding.
| msackmann wrote:
| During an internship almost ten years ago, I was working on a
| component of the ESA Exomars 2020 mission. After leaving the
| company, I occasionally checked the progress of the project.
| First, there was a delay for the launch of two years. Later,
| Russia invaded Ucraine. As ESA was cooperating with the Russian
| space agency, the project was stopped. It has since been
| rescheduled to 2028. It was a great learning experience, but I'm
| still not sure whether the stuff that I worked on at that time
| will ever be used.
| lxglv wrote:
| there was a whole thread on the topic:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911900
|
| I would also encourage that, to be honest. Maybe you learned
| something, maybe built some relations, maybe made a mental
| exercise and became a better person.
| 0xBDB wrote:
| I was hired to implement and operate a specific product for a
| specific customer who paid for four years of onsite support. I do
| other things too, but that's my one contractually obligated
| responsibility and my primary one.
|
| Turns out the customer didn't read the (enormously expensive)
| SOW. They don't want the product, can't ingest its output, don't
| want to do the work necessary to implement it, and on a recent
| roadmap review listed its function as their absolute last
| priority. I am not sure whether there's been a change in
| management, or some salesperson talked really fast, or what.
|
| I am trying to appreciate this as 'salary for nothing' and use
| the time to study for other things but it turns out that for me
| this is an anxiety-inducing and unhappy experience.
| drpotato wrote:
| Get another job or use the money for counselling / therapy,
| your mental health is more important than the job.
|
| Hell, maybe try work two jobs if you can!
| gedy wrote:
| > for me this is an anxiety-inducing and unhappy experience.
|
| Don't measure yourself by goofy corporate politics. It's not
| your fault (and ignore their political blame games). You can
| make the world a better place by the pay you are receiving.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| One of the weirdest psychological insights, which many people
| including myself have discovered recently, is that a fake job
| that doesn't actually require any work can be more stressful
| and unpleasant than a real job.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| I have had this job before.
|
| You have two choices.
|
| 1. Start a side gig. Be busy at work make extra money.
|
| 2. Work on open source. Find a project you like or want to work
| on and do that.
|
| PS: set up a home lab and learn to love SSH tunnels.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Every time I'm asked to do "sales engineering" (a term I hate).
| What I mean is the sales people are going to demo the product to
| a prospect and they know there is a feature gap that this
| particular prospect will depend on. So exec asks us to design a
| build a bullshit feature that will never actually be launched, as
| quickly as possible. Nine times out of ten the prospect never
| eventuates and the effort is wasted.
|
| I understand the need to put your best foot forward for a sales
| opportunity, but there's nothing I hate more than being asked to
| build something in the lowest-quality way possible in order to
| throw it away later. I hate hate hate it.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| It could have been worse. You could have been told to then
| merge it and support it. "It already works, almost, so why do
| you need extra time on it? Now for the next feature,..."
| d--b wrote:
| The silver lining is that now you don't have to maintain it.
| Maintenance is hell.
| taberiand wrote:
| And you still get to put it on your resume (just don't mention
| that it was useless)
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| I built XKCD #936 (Horse Battery Staple) -- in German...
|
| https://pferd-batterie-tacker.com
| monsecchris wrote:
| A product for the NHS that never got used.
|
| The software for an exascale EU Horizon 2020 supercomputer that
| never got built.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Oh I thought this was gonna be that like the entire product /
| company / idea was useless, not just like a small number of
| weeks' worth of work.
|
| I've probably created a hundred or more proofs of concept for
| things that turned out to be a bad idea. Say these averaged out
| to a week or so of work each, and that's about two full years of
| useless work.
|
| And that's ok! Most stuff you work on will get thrown away before
| you leave a company, and the rest will get thrown away not long
| after that.
|
| This doesn't really bum me out, but I can certainly understand
| why people experience it that way.
|
| Honestly though, I think it's worse when things I've created _do_
| persist for a long time. They 're never nearly good enough and I
| hate to think that they still exist nonetheless.
|
| I guess my point is: try not to sweat this stuff; it will drive
| you crazy.
| saintlunaire wrote:
| Needed to read this, thank you!
| wolletd wrote:
| > and the rest will get thrown away not long after that.
|
| I'm still working on a project that was mainly written by
| someone who left the company right before I joined - ten years
| ago.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| That's a really difficult question, since a cancelled/abandoned
| project made any usefulness zero.
|
| I guess if you learn something at least it wasn't entirely
| useless, but then how do you exact;y measure uselessness?
| landgenoot wrote:
| Sometimes, I wonder how many of the LOC's that I have written are
| executed every day.
|
| I honestly don't know.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Further research is needed
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I don't think your work is entirely useless here, under the
| assumption that the tool is deprecated but nobody has
| discontinued using it yet. Even deprecated tools need some
| maintenance from time to time, and in a big organization there's
| lots of legacy stuff that's kept around for a long time because
| replacing it is a lower priority than other roadmap items.
|
| For a useless/meaningless project I did once, I wrote the read
| and announce portions of a userspace BLE stack against the BlueZ
| sockets in Linux because it was quicker and easier than figuring
| out how to use the DBus interface. It also turned out to be about
| 10 times faster latency wise. We needed it to do a proof of
| concept for something which later didn't pan out in the market.
| The code still lives in our repository and gets compiled into our
| products but nobody plugs the Bluetooth dongle that triggers its
| activation into any fielded product.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It was allegedly a front end for configuring traffic signals,
| allegedly to be used by the kind of Engineer (uppercase E) with
| licensure from the state.
|
| It was actually just a Front. You'd buy it and then our support
| people (without said licensure), instead of supporting the
| software, would go out into the field and configure the things
| for you.
| windowshopping wrote:
| I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering
| online. It's way better than any other available option.
|
| I've never shared it with the magic community because I think
| wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so
| three years of work is just sitting idle.
|
| I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
| tgittos wrote:
| I started building a Magic based data science tool for 6 months
| before coming to the same inevitable conclusion. It sits in a
| Github private repo rotting away.
| smokel wrote:
| Have you tried contacting them to see if they are interested in
| using it to their advantage as well?
| brianwawok wrote:
| They already paid millions to develop and sell another 2
| versions of this. No way they want OPs,
| HenryBemis wrote:
| At best they will bully anyone who made anything to hand it
| over to them (for free "or else"), and then scavenge on it
| in case they see anything they like for future 'features'.
| saulpw wrote:
| At least make them send you the C&D! And you can get some
| attention for your hard work in the weeks/months before they
| do. Who knows what it will lead to?
| sph wrote:
| Go out with a bang. Release it, enjoy your 15 minutes in the
| spotlight, and when the lawyers come a-knocking, shut it down.
| Or make it open source and let the community take the wheel and
| the responsibility.
|
| You never know what opportunities this adventure might bring,
| but certainly more than just keeping it on your hard drive. Go
| for it mate.
| windowshopping wrote:
| I may indeed do this. There is an outstanding issue I have to
| address that I've never quite worked up the motivation to
| deal with:
|
| Heroku restarts their servers once every 24 hours with only
| thirty seconds' warning. Since the games are in-memory, this
| of course kicks everyone out of whatever games they may be in
| the middle of.
|
| I guess the solution is to have the games be on Redis instead
| of in-memory? I'm a bit more front-end oriented so I was
| bewildered to learn this was how it worked in the first place
| and I'm not 100% confident in my solution.
| jryb wrote:
| Is using a host that doesn't do this not a possibility?
| HoppyHaus wrote:
| The quickest win would to move off of Heroku. Either rent
| your own server that you can control (to a reasonable
| degree), or find an alternative that doesn't suffer that
| issue.
|
| Redis would work but I'd be afraid of race conditions.
| There probably wouldn't be any, but it's something to be
| aware of.
|
| If you wanted to test the waters with at least the relative
| public, I'd consider doing step 1 of renting a server, but
| then hiding it behind a Tor hidden service. Inconvenient to
| connect to? Yeah. (Probably) safe from the Hasbro demons?
| Also yeah.
| ragnese wrote:
| Off topic, but I recently looked in to playing MtG again
| because my son expressed interest. But, I was a bit taken aback
| by how different the environment is. I last played when they
| still had numbered "base sets", e.g., "9th Edition", and then
| rotating "blocks" of three smaller-but-more-advanced sets.
|
| I was assuming I would go in and buy a couple of starter decks
| from the most recent numbered "edition" to start teaching him,
| but it appears that they don't do this anymore, and everything
| I saw was focused around the "Commander" format, which has even
| more mechanics and rules. The game was _already_ complex enough
| that I was worried about teaching it to someone new (Plus, the
| commander mechanic didn 't appeal to me, personally, anyway).
|
| Is there no longer the concept of a "simple base set" with just
| the basic mechanics? Or is everything just theme-heavy sets
| now?
| clbrmbr wrote:
| I've been playing with my son, but using my shoebox full of
| old cards, many with an "IV" logo so must have been around 4e
| that I was playing back in the day.
|
| The game is complex, but a good intellectual challenge for a
| bright 6yo reader.
| tiltowait wrote:
| Probably VI; 4th edition didn't have a set symbol.
| hnfong wrote:
| Right.
|
| Also, FWIW, 5th edition also didn't have a set symbol,
| but the "Visions" set was released at around the same
| time and had a "V" symbol... (I only realized how
| confusing it was after 27 years lol...
| vharuck wrote:
| They still do core sets (every Summer, IIRC) that fulfill
| those basic edition sets. Lately, they've been set in
| external intellectual properties. Last year's was Lord of the
| Rings. Might sound bad, but the D&D set rekindled magic in my
| game group.
|
| They had a Jumpstart product, where you could buy two half-
| decks and mix them together. But it looks like the last
| printing of that was 2022.
|
| If you don't mind spending the time, you could just craft a
| starter deck on paper or find a list online, and then order
| the individual cards from a website. As long as you avoid the
| must-have cards for competitive players, it'll be cheap.
| williamcotton wrote:
| They don't do core sets any more.
| alexthehurst wrote:
| I recently got into it with my son. I bought an arena starter
| kit from Amazon and it came with two 60-card decks, which
| seemed to work pretty well in play against each other. I
| bought another one long - same result. No focus on the
| commander format at all. I would suggest that route.
| lozenge wrote:
| You could also consider games which have the mechanics of MtG
| without being collectible, such as Epic. It still has plenty
| of depth.
| darepublic wrote:
| Better to go for it then completely shelve it would think. You
| could also r skin it in some fashion, like make it more generic
| and have users provide their own decks (which happen to be MTG)
| etc
| kej wrote:
| Just brainstorming, but would it be possible to pull out the
| MTG-specific portions and make it just an online card game
| framework where people can make their own cards and rules? If
| people choose to use it to copy MTG that's on them (see
| Tabletop Simulator, for example) but they might also use it to
| create their own new games.
| mtrpcic wrote:
| The challenge is that the level of complexity with rules
| interactions in MtG is absolutely enormous, especially if you
| want to allow the freeform format, which allows all sets and
| cards.
|
| Note: You can see all the rules here:
| https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Comprehensive_Rules
| mandmandam wrote:
| There's probably someone out there with a great card game that
| is just lacking a site...
|
| Could you adapt the thing to suit another card game?
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| OK listen up dude.
|
| > I built the best site out there for playing magic the
| gathering online.
|
| No you didn't! You built the best site out there for playing
| _trading card games_. It just so happens that it 's very easy
| to point to your own local card/rule sets, share them with
| peers, and play together online. And if the cards/rules being
| used by the clients happen to be MTG cards/rules, oh well!
| That's out of your hands.
|
| Seriously, if you want to release this you only need to make it
| a) generic out of the box, and b) completely customizable at
| the client level. Of course this would never support true
| competitive play since you can _never trust the client_ , but
| it would still be super fun for playing against people you
| trust. And as a bonus you could support user-created cards and
| rules.
| Marthinwurer wrote:
| There are several projects that implement the MTG engine and
| are in active use. Forge and Xmage are the main ones. You could
| ask their developers how they avoid getting C&D'ed. It's
| definitely doable and your work doesn't have to be in vain.
| hhh wrote:
| Do what every other VC firm does, do it and don't care. When
| the C&D comes, comply. Let users cause an uproar for you.
| garbanz0 wrote:
| pretty sure i'm cursed, after 7 years in the business i would say
| only half of what i worked on lasted more than 2 years
| psnehanshu wrote:
| Worked for a client via freelancing. Built 3 projects, all
| failed. He likes to follow the trends, first SaaS, then
| crypto/blockchain, and now AI. He apparently raises money, pays
| himself and builds bullshit projects. That's it. But while doing
| so, he does everything to look like a legit startup.
|
| Ngl, he was my first major client with whom I gained a lot of
| experience, but it doesn't change the fact that he is a hype
| chaser.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Being a parasite is a very effective survival strategy.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| No cleantech???
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| If it's at all possible to get moved to work on sometthing that
| is not "useless" then I would push for that. Would your TL be
| open to it?
|
| Not only for job satisfaction but, given the current market and
| the propensity for layoffs, working on something useful will give
| you a little more job security
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| But to answer the original question: I worked on a huge, year+
| refactor with zero user impact. Hated it and felt very insecure
| in my job during it
| matrix_overload wrote:
| TL is lining you up for PIP/termination. The other guy on the
| team is likely his buddy. Come review time, you will be shown as
| an IC that struggles to deliver, and the other guy will get all
| the credit.
|
| Been there, seen that. Start looking for other teams internally
| ASAP.
| eddyfromtheblok wrote:
| I've been the other guy in this scenario before.. because it's
| a deprecated tool, this is a low risk way to demonstrate some
| reliability improvements, and a way for the TL to 'scratch the
| itch' of reducing risk. The other guy's improvements will be
| built into the new tool.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Woof AlertTM converts dog barks to email.
| https://github.com/FoxDotBuild/woof-alert
| 0xC0ncord wrote:
| Subject: Woof! Body: I SEE SOMETHING!
|
| I love it.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Squirrel!!
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| This is mission critical.
| sage76 wrote:
| Nice. How does it send the mail? Do you need a local mailserver
| running?
| anon115 wrote:
| literally all of my projects but i learned something out each and
| every1
| kelnos wrote:
| I have a hard time calling this "useless" or saying I saw "no
| sense in doing [it] at all". It originally actually did seem like
| a great idea. But ultimately all our work was for nothing, so I
| think it maybe does qualify as useless.
|
| It's 2009. After spending 5 years at my first job, I got the
| opportunity to work for a small (15-person), new (around 6 months
| old) startup. I jumped at the chance. While I was grateful for my
| first job (the mentorship and experience turned out to be
| incredibly valuable), I wasn't really excited about it anymore.
|
| The new gig was going to change higher education. No longer would
| students carry around several tens of pounds of textbooks.
| Instead they'd carry around our tablet (we planned to sell a one-
| screen and two-screen, foldable version). It was fairly large,
| and supported touch and pen input, so students could highlight
| and take notes directly in the textbooks. The iPad didn't exist
| yet, and the idea of pervasive touch screens was still new but
| exciting.
|
| We all worked so hard on it: 12+ hour days, 5, 6, and sometimes 7
| days a week. I would roll into the office around 10am, and on the
| worst days drive home at 2am, sleep for 5 or 6 hours, and start
| it all again. I was tech lead for the team that built the middle
| layers: the UI framework, graphics, and parts of the input stack.
|
| A year passes, and the company has grown to over 200 people. The
| product is shaping up: there are bugs, of course, and a lot of
| missing features, but things are going well. We'd been getting a
| lot of press and had done talks and demos at tech conferences.
|
| And then we (the rank and file) learn that the company can't get
| digital rights for any useful amount of textbooks ("come back in
| three years when we renegotiate contracts", the publishers had
| been telling us), something it's clear to us that the founders
| knew for a while, but hadn't told us. The first iPad had been
| released out nine months ago, and after initial skepticism,
| people were starting to realize how versatile and useful it could
| be. To top things off, despite the iPad's smaller size and lack
| of pen input, it cost less than what our tablet (even our one-
| screen version) would need to cost to just break even.
|
| So that was it. The company laid off half the staff (mostly on
| the hardware side), pivoted to making iPad apps, and sold off the
| hardware IP for pennies on the dollar. I lasted a couple more
| months before I quit, disappointed and disillusioned.
|
| In total it was about 15 months of 70+ hour work weeks,
| completely useless. I'm sure a lot of people have failed startup
| stories, but this was the only one that I (in hindsight, perhaps
| foolishly and naively) poured my heart and soul and time into.
| mustashio wrote:
| I present to you.... www.donaldsniffs.com
| angarg12 wrote:
| Working for big tech, our Director wanted to add "ML" to one of
| our workflows no matter what. He identified a "problematic step"
| and a team of scientist spent 1 year coming up with a ML model to
| replace this step. I was asked to deploy this solution in
| production.
|
| When we tested the model (which somehow hadn't happened before)
| we found that the workflow was 5% quicker, but the results were
| more than 10% worse, and was more expensive to run. Everyone
| hated the idea, but the director kept pushing to do it, "or I'll
| find someone else to do it". I ran away and never looked back.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| Do you think the director was truly convinced AI was a good
| technical solution despite the evidence? Or is it possible they
| were participating in an emperor-has-no-clothes situation, i.e.
| the CEO has mandated all teams implement AI _somewhere_ ,
| _anywhere_?
| rm445 wrote:
| I'm not saying it was a sensible decision, but I think at
| that level you kinda need to have a few balls in the air.
| Having a few projects using ML or whatever else is in vogue
| is defensible, might be a win, might build some expertise,
| shows you're in touch with the current thing etc.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Almost assuredly he knew it was a bad idea, but had a goal of
| "implement machine learning" from his VP or just wanted it in
| his resume.
| smokel wrote:
| I'm learning to play chess, does that count?
| robofanatic wrote:
| > The thing is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull
| requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously
| requested by this guy in my team. Adjustments to make the
| pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely
| scenarios.
|
| IMO only this part is useless. I have been through this and it
| feels horrible. sometimes its waste of time arguing with people
| so I just do what the reviewer says even though it doesn't make
| any sense.
| shaftway wrote:
| Any time you feel useless, remember that it's someone's job to
| install turn signals into BMWs.
| INTPenis wrote:
| They aren't useless at all, I see them used all the time when
| they double park somewhere.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| TikTok is leaking
| massysett wrote:
| ? I don't get it, isn't the person installing critical safety
| features in an automobile performing a valuable social
| function?
| shaftway wrote:
| The joke is that BMW drivers don't use them.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Not familiar with that meme/stereotype...
| paulddraper wrote:
| Reminds me of the difference between a BMW and a porcupine.
|
| (A porcupine has pricks on the outside.)
| dgfitz wrote:
| Someone once told me "as a current BMW driver, the whole 'BMW
| drivers don't use signals' is complete bullshit, I didn't use
| them before I drove one!"
|
| So I wonder if someone not using turn signals in a non-BMW is a
| leading indicator that they may buy one in the future.
|
| Shower thoughts.
| datavirtue wrote:
| You nailed it.
| internet101010 wrote:
| BMW turn signals used to work differently until I think the
| mid-2010s. You would press down to turn on the left signal, it
| would revert back to the middle, then you would press down
| again to turn it off.
|
| People would turn on the signal and then accidentally turn on
| the opposite signal when trying to turn it off. So a lot of
| people stopped using them.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Have you see the new animated turn signals on luxury cars? I've
| noticed that people actually use them!
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yes, I always wonder WTF is going on and after it's too late
| to be of any use it registers and I'm reminded of all the
| stuff I'm reading about in this thread.
| dwagnerkc wrote:
| Them: We need this iOS app. The government of XYZ wants it.
|
| Me (2 months later): Here it is.
|
| Them:
| LaserDiscMan wrote:
| I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed
| over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of
| the entire company, everything passed through it. The CFO and
| some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their
| shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat. When new management took
| charge, an initiative was started to replace the system with an
| industry standard solution. Both myself and the CTO (my boss)
| made it clear that we strongly felt this would not only go way
| over budget, but ultimately fail as a project.
|
| Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the
| project was given the go ahead by the directors after several
| meetings with a vendor. After the CTO and I expressed our
| concerns about the scale of the project and the sheer amount of
| functionality involved, the vendor gleefully assured us that they
| were experienced with "migrations of this scale" and were more
| than prepared, which was music to the ears of the CFO.
|
| Daily 2-3 hour meetings followed (for many months) to define the
| scope of the project. Within each meeting I sort of zoned out
| because it became very obvious that no only did the vendor not
| understand the scale of the work involved, but had started
| cutting corners everywhere/leaving out crucial functionality, and
| this was just the scoping stage, no development had even started
| yet.
|
| I eventually departed the company but kept in contact with the
| CTO and learned that after 5 years (project was scoped for 2),
| the migration was abandoned costing multiple millions of dollars
| with nothing to show for it.
| 89vision wrote:
| > the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced
| with "migrations of this scale"
|
| Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It's inevitable that Sales will put Product in a bad spot
| because they're too good at selling their own innocence.
| whstl wrote:
| Quite the opposite, they are experienced with those endless
| migrations.
|
| French poet Paul Valery once said: "A poem is never finished,
| only abandoned".
|
| It is the same for those projects. You just gotta keep paying
| forever.
| notatoad wrote:
| >The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for
| their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat
|
| the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is
| their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is
| secondary.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Which is why they are vastly better whilst in the middle of a
| tricky migration, especially if it is going badly, and
| especially especially if it is being done by the most
| expensive contractors.
| notatoad wrote:
| yes, the key is to always have some sort of migration
| happening so every problem can be addressed by saying "this
| will be resolved after the new ERP is rolled out"
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| And you can decline to do literally any piece of work
| because you need to focus on the migration.
|
| Perfect scheme.
| thih9 wrote:
| What happened to the CFO?
| datavirtue wrote:
| Hmmm, maybe check his LinkedIn where he brags about the
| successful transition and ERP migration he led at that
| company.
| permalac wrote:
| That happened in my company. The CIO left bragging about
| implementing itil on servicenow. What they did was
| replacing RT for servicenow, and only for some ticketing
| queues. Nothing else, no change management, no cmdb, only
| an incident and non standard requests queues.
|
| 128k/ year, while RT still runs in a VM for all the other
| ticketing queues.
|
| Lots of powerpoints.
| frontalier wrote:
| probably got hired by the vendor
| blantonl wrote:
| Consulting:
|
| If you're not part of the solution, be part of the problem.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Or to put it in other terms, the boxer who throws the fight
| also gets paid very well.
| rm445 wrote:
| That is surprising, the industry of implementing industry-
| standard ERP systems is pretty established. I'd have expected
| it to go way over time and budget (they always do) but
| eventually succeed. Usually success is in proportion to the
| company's willingness to admit they're not special and can do
| the same things as other companies instead of having everything
| bespoke.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on
| mostly manufacturing and distribution
|
| the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah
| Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because
| people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than
| work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other
| system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of
| dollars going in and out of Shopify (or x system) daily, and
| you are not that special. You will spend 10x as much trying
| to NOT use the system rather than trying to use it".
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I worked in consulting for over a decade, and... yeah. When
| people migrate from one system to another, they try to make
| the new system work _exactly_ the way the original system
| does, especially if the original system is homegrown. That
| lack of flexibility tends to be responsible for more than
| half the cost (and time span) of the migration.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "We hate everything about our system, get us a new one"
|
| "We want the new system to work exactly like our old one"
|
| It's probably not worth the money...
| drekipus wrote:
| I haven't pieced those together but of course they go
| hand in hand.
|
| I had one guy want me to recreate Microsoft word, worts
| and all, because his current Word wasn't doing it for him
| swatcoder wrote:
| But they don't try to "buck the system" just for the sake
| of it.
|
| Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and
| often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new
| system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal
| oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the
| project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole
| division or organization inevitavly costs some _multiple_
| of that budget while vendors, consultants, and internal
| spearheaders all pretend it 's negligible.
|
| You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the
| final damning issue in many of these projects but the root
| cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely
| quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| Hershey? https://pemeco.com/a-case-study-on-hersheys-erp-
| implementati...
| INTPenis wrote:
| Not a project, and a second hand story that I'm sure a lot of
| people can recognize.
|
| But I knew a sysadmin at a large european educational institution
| whose only job it was to hit up-arrow and enter a few times a day
| when a server crashed.
|
| They knew how to fix this too, they just didn't care. And nobody
| else had enough experience to understand.
| datascienced wrote:
| A bit like Lost (TV Series)
| snoopsnopp wrote:
| This actually really common eventually every devops guy in over
| their heads becomes a human deadman's switch.
| nirav72 wrote:
| Last year I spent way too much time wiring up a janky contraption
| using a raspberry Pico wireless board and couple of optocouplers,
| so I could simulate a button press on a USB switch used as a KVM
| between my work notebook and personal PCs. So I could then call
| the pico board via http from a button push on an Elgato
| streamdeck.
|
| While it worked, it was still a bit slower than me simply
| pressing a button on the little wired remote that came with the
| USB switch.
| turrini wrote:
| "Revela Preco" (Price Reveal), a smartphone app for comparing
| prices across establishments.
|
| In Brazil, all businesses must issue an invoice or a fiscal
| receipt. The latter includes purchase details and a QR code with
| a URL that directs the consumer to the respective state's SEFAZ
| (Department of Finance). This allows consumers to view their
| purchase receipt online and print a second copy if needed.
|
| However, each SEFAZ operates differently, if they function at
| all. This hindered the app's progress, as the constant
| unavailability of state services led to numerous user complaints.
|
| The project is currently on hold until the receipt consultation
| process is centralized within the Federal Revenue Service,
| similar to how invoices are handled currently.
|
| The project's goal is to allow users to compare recent prices
| from those who have purchased and scanned their receipts,
| enabling them to create shopping lists in advance and know where
| they can save money.
|
| Relying on each state's government to keep their systems
| operational has become the project's biggest obstacle.
|
| I consider it "useless" because of the time spent on it and the
| inability to continue due to our government's inefficiency.
| chrystalkey wrote:
| I work at a well known German company and I am employed a little
| less than half time as a working student to singlehandedly plan,
| manage and implement a project that is shown every now and then
| at technology conferences and demonstrations as one of two
| demonstrations. I am not able to decide anything on my own, since
| almost everything has to go through some superior to be
| bought/allowed. Despite this PR Desaster waiting to happen, no
| one else in the team gives any serious time to this project, but
| whenever the deadline of conference X comes around, I am the one
| being pressured to get things done. There are red flags on the
| project all around and I know it is not going to work since there
| has never even been a clear project vision from the start, and
| every month or so my direct supervisor comes along with a new
| turn, a new feature to be implemented despite it not working at
| all with whatever has been there before let alone as a complete
| concept. I have to actively un-implement certain features to make
| the next new thing work. Thank god I have a limited contract and
| I am out of there at the end of the month.
| Lerc wrote:
| I have so many options. Here's a top three
|
| https://c50.fingswotidun.com/ useless but arguably art.
|
| https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/ an
| ide,assembler,emulation for a fictional 8 bit computer.
|
| https://github.com/Lerc/notanos A html/js desktop for Linux that
| I really should finish sometime.
|
| These three projects have a combined user base in single digits.
| Mostly just me.
| worik wrote:
| For a very large software and hardware company's local office in
| NZ in 2001
|
| What they asked for: Refreshing their suit of unit tests, 10,000
| of them, that had gone stale (that applied to their widely used
| C++ telephony library)
|
| Budget NZ$1,000,000
|
| (Don't ask what, why, really?)
|
| I joined half way through
|
| Half the budget spent, nothing to show, mission mysteriously
| changed to producing a deep packet inspection tool. (What
| happened to the unit tests you ask? Be quiet! Take the money)
|
| My job was to reach deep into their system and bring the data to
| the surface, roughly speaking
|
| Thing is nobody that worked on the library wanted, needed, or
| asked for any aspect of what were doing
|
| The design for it was written on a whiteboard by the project lead
| before I joined
|
| Then the whiteboard was cleaned.
|
| So the design was in one man's head
|
| That man, the project lead, quit 3 weeks before delivery
|
| On handover day I was a bit afraid, I had taken care to keep good
| records of my obeying (increasingly unhinged) instructions, so I
| was confident I could not be blamed (I was younger and naive-not
| part of the story)
|
| But I fully expected an unpleasant "you did what with our money?
| What were you thinking?" type of unpleasant meeting
|
| Instead the corporate types sat around a table gushing how
| wonderful everything was, what a brilliant job we'd all done...
|
| I was stunned. I understand now, I learnt that day, that it was
| in no-one's interest to acknowledge the waste of a million bucks
|
| Coming from academia, as I was more or less, this was a valuable
| lesson.
|
| But utterly worthless software for a million dollars
|
| I still use some of the furniture I bought with the money....
| datavirtue wrote:
| There are multi-million dollar projects churned out and
| abandoned multiple times per day. Very common.
|
| I just left a company where I was contracting with a few other
| people for about a year. About $1.2MM down the drain. There is
| no hope of spinning that product up. The owners "suspended" the
| project and the entire brain trust evaporated. Imagine the bank
| owners from the movie Mary Poppins interfacing with
| technologists and startup founders. Whoosh...
| clbrmbr wrote:
| After the first lecture of my first programming course in
| college, I went to the Professor Tewksbury and started to tell
| him about a simulator I was writing to help other students check
| their work.
|
| He holds up his hand to stop me speaking, says "you have an A.
| Don't come to class anymore."
|
| So, I never went to class or did any of the assigned work,
| instead working on the simulator in my dormroom. At the end of
| the term I got a failing mark. I went to Tewksbury, and he had no
| recollection of having told me that I shouldn't come to class. I
| tried explaining myself about the simulator, and showed him. He
| grudgingly agreed to change my mark, seeming suspicious.
|
| Despite my attempts to work with the dept, the simulator never
| got used.
| ttymck wrote:
| Awesome story, and a good lesson in "always get it in writing"
| datascienced wrote:
| The concept seems weird to me. I have never been given a mark
| by a teacher that matters. Exams were administered by
| independent bodies.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| In the UK that's the case through high school and college
| (UK definition, 16-18) but at university the exams and
| coursework are graded by the lecturer/professor. So that's
| likely what happened here.
| ttymck wrote:
| Yes, academic administration is different in different
| countries. In the US it's especially criticized for its
| subjectivity, here which we have a great example of.
| exccenture wrote:
| I used to work at Accenture back when they paid workers
| overtime. As engagement managers got into overage
| (underestimated projects, often fixed fee), they would put
| pressure on their workers to work overtime but not log the
| hours. Two law firms were already reaching out to workers
| ~2002 trying to form a class for a class action lawsuit.
|
| My boss came by one Friday morning and informed me i'd be
| onsite working all weekend and told me to "ensure not work
| over 40hrs" this week. This is an impossibility, I had been
| working late all week and was already at 45 or 50hrs for the
| week, and I still had Friday/Saturday/Sunday to go.
|
| So after the discussion, I sent him an email, casual, saying
| I've cancelled my flight back home for the weekend,
| confirming i'll be onsite all weekend and that I'd ensure to
| "only log 40hrs this week".
|
| He came by my desk furious and said if I "ever pulled a stunt
| like that again there would be consequences"
|
| So I re-plied to the original email, took him off, put on my
| personal gmail and just recounted the entire episode and sent
| the email again.
| majikandy wrote:
| I feel there is something missing in this story... what was
| implied by your email about cancelling your flight home the
| agreement to only log 40 hours? Sounds like you were just
| saying "affirmative"... what is the stunt he thinks you
| were pulling? And what is the second email about which you
| mention gmail and taking him off.
|
| It was a great story until that point and I want to know
| what happened next, I feel I'm missing something.
| myownpetard wrote:
| He was creating a paper trail for illegal working/billing
| practices.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The stunt is creating a paper trail.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It was obviously a joke you didn't get
| 2600guy wrote:
| During my tenure in college, had a professor that would write
| 10s or 100s of line of code to do things that could literally
| be done in one or two. Pointed this out to him a couple of
| times, not that I had been a dev for 15 years at this point.
| Everytime he squashed anything I said. Comes to end of semester
| project. Within 24 hours of him handing it out, myself and team
| handed in final solution, which absolutely worked and fulfilled
| all requirements. We all got a not completed at final grade.
| Found out later that only 3 people in the class got an A, and
| they were the only females in the class, everyone else got a
| not completed. Immediately after having a convo with the
| "professor" and the threat of convo with dean of students,
| suddenly everyone got a passing grade. What a piece of human
| garbage.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I tried to place out of an intro-to-programming course in a
| back-to-school bout of scholastic achievement. I wasn't
| allowed to test out of it despite the coursewor being rote
| and that anyone with 2 seconds looking at my CV could see I
| did not need it. Anyway - they released the assignments on
| day 1. I turned them in on day 2. I still had to go to class.
| Stupid.
|
| My "filesystems and database design" class was basically
| howto use mysql. It's a shame, I was more interested in
| actual file system and database design
|
| Just stupid stuff like that made me drop the academic
| bullshit and skip into the real world.
| WideCharr wrote:
| Was this at Stevens Tech? I had a Prof Tewksbury there that
| would have done something just like this.
| gedy wrote:
| Put on a instant meeting product that was "top priority". 4
| months of good work with an understaffed team, come to find out
| they had another team in another office doing same thing, who
| knew about us, but not us them... We were naively doing demos
| while management knew this was throwaway.
| throwaway_haha wrote:
| The most useless thing I worked on was as a working student. The
| whole org was developing on one specific product (around 200
| people) for around 4 years. Our company did a strategic
| acquisition and the acquired company made the same kind of
| product our org was doing. Their product was already in use, so
| they disassembled our org overnight and moved the affected teams
| to different projects.
|
| The software architect of my team was heartbroken because of
| this. He was fully committed and it was exactly his dream to work
| on such a product. The last 4 years he was working his ass off
| and everything went to waste. I still feel bad for him.
| robofanatic wrote:
| I built this https://www.squashbyte.com/
|
| nobody plays this except me, that too once in a blue moon.
| sleepingox wrote:
| In 2013 I helped make an AI powered dashboard creator tool called
| Watson Analytics.
|
| In 2023 I helped make an AI powered internal tool for Meta. ...
|
| The IBM one works better still.
| delecti wrote:
| It was at Amazon and I don't remember exactly what the service
| was called, I think it was AdSomething. It was while I worked on
| the Kindle Special Offers (taking advantage of the "off" screen
| of an e-ink Kindle to show ads) project. I find that to be one of
| the less offensive forms of advertising, so I was generally
| pretty happy on that team for a time.
|
| But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a
| sub-site of Amazon.com and just casually? recreationally? vote
| between two ads. You would be presented with two B&W images and
| click the one you liked more. I don't know that there was any
| incentive to do this, but I think it was a Bezos idea.
|
| I didn't develop it, but all the routine maintenance tasks that
| came along (remove this deprecated library, migrate to new
| hardware, update your pipeline) needed to be done for AdWhatever
| too. That stupid service lingered for years after it was clear
| nobody used it, but we had to keep maintaining it until we got
| the go-ahead to tear it down.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Slightly off topic but I never logged in on my kindle so I
| don't get ads. I just load ebooks on it with my computer.
| delecti wrote:
| Yeah, the ease of avoiding the ads (not logging in,
| jailbreaking it, or just getting a cover) were all big parts
| of why I felt like kindle ads were so much less offensive
| than most online advertising.
| alibarber wrote:
| Some years ago, a colleague literally spent all night in the
| office, on the 31st of March, implementing clippy for another
| third party commercial application (not MS Office) that was
| heavily used by the company and across that industry.
|
| He inspired me to take April Fool's seriously. I've since changed
| industries but last year I jumped on the AI bandwagon with
| https://chatellite.space and this year a nod to a popular mobile
| game https://flappysat.space .
|
| Functionally completely useless but they taught me a lot and made
| some people laugh.
| whstl wrote:
| Wow, I once added clippy to a website I worked on too :)
|
| It wasn't an all-nighter, though! I used clippy.js, so it was
| just a few lines!
| alibarber wrote:
| Ahh that was it, yes it was clippy.js!
|
| It was a desktop app though (with a C++ & Python API) that we
| had built a lot of integrations around, so there were a lot
| of Qt schenanigans going on, and I think he had attempted to
| get it to actually try and search some internal DB too for
| witty remarks.
| whstl wrote:
| Yep, adding to a non-web app is definitely harder!
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Really cool! chatellite.space
| FartinMowler wrote:
| Kiosk Banking. Back in the 1990's, just before the web became a
| thing, it was an idea to bring banking to consumers without the
| bank buildking, which they called "brickless banking". Kiosks
| would be placed in public locations like malls. Customers would
| enter the kiosk, close the curtain or door, then connect via
| video-call with one of the agent in the call centres. Depending
| what product the customer wanted (mortgage, credit card, etc),
| the kiosk would print the necessary forms for the customer to
| sign then deposit into a secure mailbox in the kiosk. Millions of
| investment $$$ were planned for this ... then it was suddenly
| cancelled when the bank realized what this "web" thing might
| eventually become.
| fsniper wrote:
| This kiosk thing, exactly as you describe was built by A
| Turkish bank, way after mobile banking was in everyone's
| pocket.
|
| The bank's customers are mostly aging so they thought this
| would be great help to them.
|
| I recall the kiosk got into a few locations, worked for brief
| period of time and then got deprecated all together.
| s1mon wrote:
| Wells Fargo has something they call a "digital branch" which,
| despite the name, is a brick and mortar location, just with
| fewer services. Like, you can't get change, and they don't have
| real tellers. They have a few ATMs and some people who must be
| there to walk you through some things, but overall it's pretty
| useless. It's one of the reasons we're moving our banking to
| Chase.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| A lot of French banks are like this. Probably elsewhere in
| Europe too.
|
| "Advisory" by appointment is where the profit is, not cash
| management.
|
| If you need a lot of cash, the "teller" will give you temp
| permissions for X minutes to use the ATM for your big
| withdrawal.
| shafyy wrote:
| A great book I can recommend on this very topic: Bullshit Jobs
| (https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...)
| sage76 wrote:
| I am writing a solution manual to this textbook, by solving EVERY
| DAMN exercise and writing it up in latex.
|
| It is EXTREMELY time consuming.
|
| The actual solution manual is already available online.
|
| I might gain an understanding of this field, but I doubt I will
| ever get an interesting job because of this effort.
|
| Unless I revise this stuff, I will forget most of it in a few
| years.
|
| Why am I doing this? Idk. Vanity perhaps?
|
| Somebody stop me....
| dark__paladin wrote:
| What book? I always thought that doing this with Evans PDE
| would be the best possible way to learn the subject, but I am
| not skilled or dedicated enough to do such a task.
| sage76 wrote:
| Pattern recognition and machine learning by Christopher
| Bishop.
| jdswain wrote:
| That reminds me of a story about a friend of mine from high
| school. In fourth form (age 14) he did every exercise in our
| maths textbook and sent the author a list of corrections to the
| printed answers. I don't think this was very well received by
| the author. That friend went on to miss 7th form year, got
| preferential entry into a maths degree, and had his degree by
| the time I finished year 1.
| sage76 wrote:
| Just curious, do you remember the name of the book and how
| big it was in terms of content and exercises?
| jdswain wrote:
| It was big. Compared to textbooks today it was probably
| very good. Hardcover and probably 500 pages. This was 1984,
| in New Zealand, but I think the textbook was British.
|
| I tried to help my daughter with some maths a few months
| ago and I couldn't believe how bad her textbook was. It
| didn't appear to explain anything, just used exercises to
| show results.
| sailorganymede wrote:
| My last job had me updating a legacy service in a totally
| different language to what i was hired for a technology that was
| gonna get replaced in one month - hence rendering one months
| effort as useless.
| richardw wrote:
| I was forced to orchestrate the replacement of Kafka with IBM MQ
| in a running financial institution because new execs understood
| it better from previous roles in other companies. Crazy
| newfangled micro services and event driven architecture freaked
| them out. Change was across about 50 microservices, maybe 5/6
| different tech stacks (SAP, Java, .net, python etc). Had to write
| the MQ scripts to build up the topic and queue stack because
| their amazing ops guy deployed prod by taking a backup of dev
| files and installing it on the prod server as his "installation",
| and played whack a mole with whatever errors he got. I don't know
| how we survived. Did actually manage to make it a useful change
| but it was soul destroying. Lost zero messages and delivered zero
| duplicates, and could roll back anytime. They're ready for
| whatever the 90's throws at them.
| blantonl wrote:
| That will connect right up with DB/2 probably, no problemo.
|
| You'll just need the right Java JRE - exact version.
| thom wrote:
| Corporate users of 3G dongles used to rack up enormous charges
| while roaming. They'd get hit with five-figure bills and complain
| to their carrier that they didn't warn them, and often the
| carrier would end up swallowing the charge, even though they were
| rarely marking up the costs heavily. I worked on a project with a
| major carrier to enable companies to monitor and alert on cost
| overruns, and shut off devices in some cases. But before we
| launched, the EU basically cracked down on the underlying charges
| and made roaming far less stressful for everybody. Shame, because
| we had quite a nice end to end setup that would test real world
| usage on many combinations of laptops and dongles and ensure
| everything triggered properly.
| netsharc wrote:
| I suppose the tool would still be useful for EU -> not EU
| roamers? Interestingly Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway are
| not part of the EU but I know my German SIM card works there
| with its home tariff, but Switzerland is still the holdout.
| EDIT: Wikipedia says Monaco, Andorra and San Marino also don't
| have free roaming...
|
| Also, did this EU directive come as a surprise? AFAIK they move
| at glacial pace and carriers should've seen it coming...
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Liechtenstein, Norway, and Iceland are part of the EEA, where
| 95% of EU law still applies.
| thom wrote:
| It probably would still be useful - even quite recently a UK
| politician got into hot water running up a large bill on his
| work iPad, I'll admit I've not followed the industry for the
| last decade as anything but a consumer, You also see the same
| dynamic with cloud costs where this certainly is active area
| for startups. Anywhere you can see massive bill shock, you
| have both sides of the market motivated to fix it, because
| the provider often ends up absorbing the costs when the
| customer complains.
| crabbone wrote:
| Well... I've been programming for something close to 25 years,
| created a bunch of libraries used by... I don't really know the
| statistics today, but at the height of popularity there were
| certainly hundreds of users. I can write decently in a bunch of
| programming languages, some very popular and some not so much.
| I've been a teamlead for some years, a department manager.
|
| Today I'm a grunt in a department of a large international
| company. This department was previously a separate company, but
| was acquired two years ago. The parent company has very little
| interest in what our department is doing in general.
|
| But, that's not the most useless part, of course. My boss sucks
| as a programmer. But, on top of being very bad, he's only worked
| for this one company where he's today. He has no clue how bad he
| is because he's never seen anything else. After tasking me with
| writing some code and not being able to understand it, seeing how
| I wouldn't use the disastrously bad practices he instituted in
| his department, he decided to never give me any work that
| requires writing any code ever again.
|
| It's been close to two years since I've written the last bit of
| code that went into any of the company's repos :) I've been given
| tasks that require exclusively painfully boring manual testing.
| It's even funnier because all those things I'm allegedly testing
| are, sort of, tested automatically (but automation is so awful
| that it mostly doesn't work).
|
| I attend every morning meeting (online) and just read the news /
| Reddit / HN during the meeting. The meetings consist of my boss
| enjoying himself talk for about an hour. Then me and the other
| guy tell him that we have nothing to add and wish him a pleasant
| day.
|
| I haven't opened my work email for months :) The last time I did
| so was because HR sent some form I had to sign, and they found me
| in Slack to tell that they've been waiting for my signature for
| far too long.
|
| To add to the pile: the product our department works on is awful
| in more ways than I can count. It's hard to decide which part of
| it is worst, but to give you an example: in one of the recent
| features the customer asked for, instead of implementing this
| feature the two developers assigned to the task produced two MS
| Word documents, one around 10 pages long another one closing on
| 90. These two documents detailed a DIY process of implementing
| this feature (by the customer), mostly consisting of shell
| commands interspersed with terse and vague descriptions. Needles
| to say there was never any kind of plan for how the feature
| should be implemented. Product management is, basically,
| nonexistent where I work.
|
| And then I was asked if I can test it... :D In, like... a few
| days. Because the mothership company requires publishing a
| release a month, and that feature has to be in the next release.
|
| ----
|
| Hope you feel better about your plight now :)
| zem wrote:
| i once worked for a small startup that had licensed an autocad
| clone [https://www.intellicad.org/] and were customising it as a
| low-cost autocad alternative for the indian architect market. the
| platform itself had a bunch of bugs and performance issues, and i
| was hired to work on some of the more egregious ones (it was kind
| of fun, i learnt a lot doing it, but it was an ultimately futile
| task because we were never going to really compete with autocad.
| but that wasn't the useless part; i was willing to give that my
| best shot as long as everyone was realistic about what we could
| and couldn't achieve).
|
| the useless part came about when the company was clearly going
| down the drain, and the ceo was desperate to find a pivot. he had
| a friend who was a chip engineer, and said friend had complained
| to him about how hard and unintuitive EDA tools were to work
| with. our man gets convinced that the problem is that "these EDA
| firms hire scientists and mathematicians, but no one who really
| knows about UI design, unlike CAD companies", and that if we
| could hook our CAD product up to some open source circuit
| simulation libraries we could come up with an mvp that would be
| clearly so much better to use that we could get funded to develop
| it.
|
| now i usually take the stance of "okay, you're the product guy,
| tell me what to implement and i'll get it done", but this time i
| pushed back pretty hard over what a fool's errand this was. but
| he had his hardware engineer buddy talking into one ear and the
| "make money fast" shoulder devil talking into the other, and
| would not listen. so fine, i took a couple of months to play
| around with CAD fileformat parsers and electronic simulation
| libraries, got some very basic circuits working and handed over
| an MVP which of course went precisely nowhere.
| eropple wrote:
| "these EDA firms hire scientists and mathematicians, but no one
| who really knows about UI design, _unlike CAD companies_ " is
| going to sit with me for a while.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| I joined a startup once where everybody seemed to be working on
| something completely different.
|
| One project was an eBay tool, another was a chat assistant,
| another was an energy comparison tool...
|
| The CEO was never in the office, she was always flying around the
| world with her daughter (given a made-up C title) visiting CEOs
| of large companies and throwing out numerous hooks to see who
| would bite.
|
| I very quickly saw through this whole charade and quit a month
| after joining.
|
| Some years later she managed to wangle a sale via a well known
| tech company she was previously a C level for. Who knows what it
| was that she ended up selling ...
| karaterobot wrote:
| I've worked on two different startups that built products until
| our runway ended--over a year of work in both cases--and then
| pulled the plug before getting our first customer.
|
| Maybe that doesn't count?
|
| I've also worked on a multi-year product for a large company in
| Redmond that I was really proud of when building it. It doesn't
| matter what the product was supposed to do, just imagine it
| sounding kind of sexy and being very complex and brainy. It was
| for scientists. When I told someone who wasn't dumb but was
| outside the software industry about what I'd built, he looked
| confused and said "well, why wouldn't you just use [a free piece
| of software that is well understood and runs on every device]
| instead?" and I had no good answer, because he was right.
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| Apparently everything I work on because our customer success team
| always seems to come back immediately after something goes into
| production with "customers can't use this!".
| jdswain wrote:
| When something I work on gets cancelled or not released, I try to
| feel better about it by thinking of the learning involved.
| Sometimes when I've been on projects that are going nowhere I
| will try and find ways to learn new things. A very minor, but
| useful example was a project early in my career where we were
| told to stop work while the management re-evaluates the project.
| I learnt to touch-type that month, a useful skill for my whole
| career. That was my first year contracting, they gave us a months
| notice on that project and I started the next contract the next
| Monday, so I billed 13 months that year.
|
| I feel for architects that see their own buildings torn down in
| their lifetimes and replaced. I'd find that hard to deal with.
| hahahacorn wrote:
| I wrote a simulator for testing different strategies to "cheese"
| Egyptian ratscrew (aka slaps) in Ruby.
| https://github.com/benngarcia/egyptian-ratscrew-ruby
|
| I really suck at the game and my buddy had ideas for different
| strategies that would beat someone skilled at the game. So I made
| a CLI tool to simulate these strategies. I haven't played the
| game since learning that yes, there are strategies that beat
| skill given a sufficiently low burn rate.
| pempem wrote:
| Built a beautiful experience focused on serving a completely
| underserved community.
|
| Won a patent for UX that solved a dicey problem which hadn't been
| addressed until that point and would impact any user under 18.
|
| Won an accessibility award for design heuristics that hewed to
| the cutting edge of accessibility not just 'this website works
| for colorblind users'
|
| The site was destroyed by internal politics. Assigned a URL that
| made it unmarketable (think...
| domain.com/projects/projectnamemarketplace) and flailed for 2
| years before being sunsetted with nearly no users.
| tdh15 wrote:
| I got frustrated with ChatGPT for hallucinating sometimes, and my
| friend said "could be worse, could hallucinate all the time." And
| I thought it'd be fun to make that, and then we came up with a
| few more, and now we have this: https://cap-gpt.onrender.com/
| alphazard wrote:
| Whenever people talk about replacing engineers with AI, I think
| about situations like this.
|
| When the first fully machine automated software consultancies
| post their first cash flow statements, there will still be humans
| building features that will never be used somewhere else in the
| same industry.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| I worked on a six-month contract project for a large US retailer;
| the fact that everybody else I worked with was laid off the
| second week probably should have told me something was wrong, but
| they kept paying me so I kept showing up.
|
| Anyway, the only task they ever gave me was to build Cisco router
| ACLs to match existing traffic in the stores; they needed to
| implement access control but wanted to make sure they weren't
| blocking anything important. Because many of the stores had been
| opened years before, there wasn't necessarily a consistent IT
| stack in the store; there were a lot of one-off solutions so they
| wanted a universal set of rules with per-store exception lists.
|
| So, every week, someone would drop a few terabytes of network
| logs in an FTP server, separated by store, and I would distill
| them down to a set of rules; if something was being used in more
| than X number of stores, it went in the universal rule list, if
| it wasn't it went in a store exception list. At first I was doing
| it semi-manually, but eventually I built a database and wrote
| some SQL to mostly automate it - got it down to about two hours a
| week, most of it waiting for the DB, by the end. Once it was
| done, I would send all of my updates to a network engineer who
| was the designated point of contact for the access control
| project.
|
| They had a lot of stores, and for some reason could only supply a
| certain amount of logs weekly, so when my contract was up there
| were still a number remaining. I tried to set up a meeting with
| the network engineer to go over the work to be done and the
| automation I'd built, but he never responded. Eventually I
| tracked down his desk in the vast corporate complex and paid him
| a visit. He was pleasant but told me that he wasn't even on the
| access control project and he thought it had probably been
| canceled at some point. He had been dutifully copying my updates
| to a network share somewhere in case they were ever needed. I
| gave him the SQL scripts and the database info and he put them
| out on the share where they probably still are today, a decade
| and a half later.
|
| So that was six months of my working life.
| blantonl wrote:
| So that was six months of my working life >> /dev/null
| Aloha wrote:
| If the retailer is still in business that data has probably
| been lovingly migrated twice, and is now in a sharepoint
| somewhere.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I had a boss at one of my last gigs who would cook up the most
| impossibly over-engineered (and badly designed and rarely worked)
| projects ever.
|
| The worst one ever was he wanted to build a kubernetes
| observability platform from scratch. Specifically, we wanted to
| filter our application logs for errors and be able to find them.
| There's a million out of the box ways to do this with free and
| enterprise tooling, like EFK/ELK setups, datadog, etc. But no. We
| wanted to do this from scratch.
|
| Well, fine I thought. Good resume builder. His approach was
| roughly this from what I recall:
|
| - On an EC2 instance we will set up permissions so it can access
| the control plane of our entire global EKS infrastructure (like 4
| dozen large clusters hosting 10k+ containers)
|
| - We will run a series of bash scripts in a background process
| that hits the control plane every few seconds with Kubectl to get
| raw pod logs and store them for analysis/error grepping (probably
| someone is laughing already)
|
| - We would use a similar series of bash scripts to automatically
| generate a mostly static website that would link to the paths of
| log files deemed "problematic" in some insane filepath system
| that was approximately organized by timestamp, the idea being if
| you thought an incident happened in Cluster XYZ at 11am you'd
| navigate through this web of raw log files and find the directory
| that had the precise timestamp you needed (linux epoch of course,
| not mm/dd/YY)
|
| - Because new files were generated all the time, like every few
| seconds, we also had to periodically "refresh" the site by
| rebuilding the static site with all the new links
|
| All told I think it ended up being some absolutely psychotic mess
| of 50+ scripts and over 15,000 lines of almost all bash and some
| Go templating.
|
| Surprisingly, it did what it was supposed to, it just looked
| terrible and had an obviously bad UX. Luckily before we could
| show it to anyone important the exact thing happened I had warned
| about and we started crashing some of the clusters' control
| planes from the sheer number of requests we were sending to it.
| He panicked and told me to shut it down.
|
| I'm sure I don't even need to go into detail how useless this is.
| I did become a wizard with kubectl, however, so it was valuable
| to me. Not so much to the company.
| blantonl wrote:
| _we also had to periodically "refresh" the site by rebuilding
| the static site with all the new links_
|
| Oh god dammit that's where you finally pissed me off. Lol.
| pknerd wrote:
| As long as you have been paid for that "useless" project, you
| should be happy about it. You learned something...plus..you can
| showcase that "useless" project on your profile or something to
| get new work.
| psion wrote:
| I was hired to design and build a loan platform from scratch. The
| company that hired me was a marketing agency that build WordPress
| and Magento sites, not scratch built platforms. but they took the
| bid from a large company and hired me to build it. I came in and
| started developing various microservices, and asked for more
| developers to assist. I got freelancers in other countries who
| usually build WordPress themes. I worked hard to keep these
| people building the right projects for months. then I was asked
| to help out with a couple of WordPress tasks for other clients.
| More and more of these, and finally I was called into the office
| and told my project was cancled by the client. They got bought
| out and was told that they were spending too much money on this
| platform before it even went anywhere. All my work got scrapped.
| I believe most of my code has been deleted.
| blantonl wrote:
| Dogged a bullet for being blamed for something that probably
| would have never left the ground anyway.
|
| Or, missed opportunity to develop and sell the next Rocket
| Mortgage Platform.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I spent the better part of a year re-documenting a piece of
| medical device software that was going to be taken over by a
| different division of the company. We didn't build any new code,
| just documentation. This was originally supposed to take 3 months
| and was going to be done by a single contractor who was supposed
| to just update documents with new templates.
|
| When we were just a month from completing this project, they laid
| off everyone involved in the project except for me. I don't know
| for sure how much this boondoggle cost, but it was at least mid-
| single-digit millions of USD just based on the number of folks
| involved.
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| That does not sound that bad, does the new division now have
| great documentation for the product?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| My CEO launched a project to convert our data/visualization
| platform from Domo to Datarama to save money and improve
| functionality. To avoid adding more work to my team, the CEO
| hired a consulting firm to do the work and assigned one of the
| operations team to help them with discovery.
|
| The project was doomed to failure because Datarama had all the
| same problems as Domo for our use case and, as the project
| dragged on, Datarama increased their pricing to match Domo's.
| Eventually the project died, but not after we paid for a year of
| Datarama and 8 months of contracting.
| rossant wrote:
| Well, this has nothing to do with programming and goes way beyond
| being merely "useless"; yet it might offer some perspective on
| your question and perhaps help you relativise things.
|
| There's a global industry involving thousands of healthcare
| professionals, lawyers, judges, police officers, and child
| protection workers who have spent 50 years prosecuting tens of
| thousands of parents and caregivers for allegedly shaking their
| babies. This is based on a theory from the 1970s, which posits
| that virtually all infants with blood around the brain and at the
| back of the eyes have been violently shaken. These professionals
| have developed entire academic journals, conferences, curricula,
| and training courses to teach this "theory" to all involved
| professionals (hospital clinicians, police officers, prosecutors,
| etc.). There are likely hundreds of such courses annually in
| dozens of countries. These people have raised probably tens of
| millions of dollars for research and prevention programs against
| shaking which, while somewhat beneficial for the well-being of
| babies, have not succeeded in reducing the global incidence of
| shaken baby syndrome diagnoses.
|
| It turns out this theory is largely incorrect, and only a
| minority of cases are likely to be actual cases of abuse: the
| other children suffer from rare diseases or household accidents
| that cause these types of bleeding, which are mistaken for signs
| of abuse. Every year, thousands of babies are removed from their
| homes and hundreds of parents and caregivers are convicted and
| incarcerated.
|
| This has been known for over 20 years, with more and more
| professionals raising the alarm, yet the diagnoses continue to be
| made every day. I discovered this 8 years ago and swore to myself
| that I would do anything I can to end it. At the time, I met
| doctors who had been trying to do the same for over 15 years, and
| here I am, 8 years later, doing everything I can but still
| feeling quite lonely and helpless. I still hope to think I'm not
| entirely useless. But more importantly, think about all these
| professionals who have built an entire industry on false
| premises, leaving a trail of devastation around the world under
| the guise of "child protection", convinced they are making the
| world a better place. Does this fit your definition of "useless"?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
|
| [2]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/152483802311516...
| rightbyte wrote:
| The guy that realized that washing your hand prevents mother
| and babies from dying in child birth was ignored and he got
| insane. I dunno what my point is. Maybe that these things are
| some sort of grind?
| kirubakaran wrote:
| He didn't go insane, but the doctors he challenged forcibly
| had him committed
|
| > In 1865, Janos Balassa wrote a document referring
| Semmelweis to a mental institution. On 30 July, Ferdinand
| Ritter von Hebra lured him, under the pretense of visiting
| one of Hebra's "new Institutes", to a Viennese insane asylum
| located in Lazarettgasse. Semmelweis surmised what was
| happening and tried to leave. He was severely beaten by
| several guards, secured in a straitjacket, and confined to a
| darkened cell. Apart from the straitjacket, treatments at the
| mental institution included dousing with cold water and
| administering castor oil, a laxative. He died after two weeks
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
| kirubakaran wrote:
| You're doing important work. Thank you!
| brightball wrote:
| I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool
| that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make
| it suck intentionally.
|
| Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert
| messages about fake errors. It was weird.
|
| EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more
| details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about
| all the complaints he was getting about it.
| snoopsnopp wrote:
| I don't mean to be the morality police, but that seems illegal.
| brightball wrote:
| It was an internal tool and the VP was the head of IT.
| Everything still worked, it was just painful to use. He could
| have pulled the plug on it at any time.
| ulchar wrote:
| this one's crazy lol.
|
| frankly it sounds kind of fun, but i'm sure it was not in
| reality.
| brightball wrote:
| It was actually pretty entertaining. This was almost 20 years
| ago.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| I kinda think nothing I did matters. After all we are just a
| small blue dot in a forest of stars.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Define "Useless."
|
| My team worked on a project for about 18 months. I won't go into
| detail about what it was, but it was (and still is) badly-needed.
|
| We worked with the _top_ interaction and graphic design folks in
| the world for the aesthetics and interaction. We had many
| meetings, flying the whole team to San Francisco, several times a
| year.
|
| When the project was in its final testing, the company got cold
| feet, and canceled the project. I had to lay off two of my
| engineers.
|
| It would _still_ , to this day, be the best of breed. It was
| designed about twenty years ago, in the early aughts.
| hathawsh wrote:
| That sounds fascinating. Have you considered starting your own
| company around re-creating it?
| sllewe wrote:
| This was a publicly traded SaaS company.
|
| After acquisition - we were handed down the order to migrate to
| AWS.
|
| This was after (in the mess of the merger) the colo contracts
| were basically ignored and not renewed. Once someone within the
| company realized the issue, it was the 11th hour.
|
| After many, many attempts to discuss our (Operations team)
| concerns, we abandoned our protests. It was clear the new CTO
| wouldn't cave and sign the contract.
|
| Some superficial testing was conducted and the order came down to
| move...NOW.
|
| We began moving hundreds (maybe thousands) of very resource
| hungry DB servers first (there was no way to use something like
| RDS without major app/config changes).
|
| Once the AWS bill came in, the CFO blew their lid and within 90
| days we were migrating BACK to our DCs (and the millions of
| dollars of hardware we left idling).
| api wrote:
| Versions of this story are pretty common out there. People
| migrate to cloud because The Cloud and think they're going to
| save money, get extreme sticker shock, and migrate back... _if
| they can_. Sometimes they get locked in and are sort of stuck.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Immigration application for my spouse. Because our application
| got binned as low-risk, I don't think they read any of the stuff
| we put together before taking their time to rubber stamp it.
| sandreas wrote:
| I currently work on building an open PCB for translating Android
| headphone remote signaling to Apple remote signaling resuming the
| awesome work of David Carne[1].
|
| Basically it is a circuit where you could use any Android inear
| Headphone with remote buttons on any Apple device with Audio Jack
| - a TRRS Plug - TRRS Jack translation layer between the 220O/660O
| vol+ and vol- signaling on Android to the proprietary Apple
| ultrasonic chirp protocol.
|
| Probably nobody (besides me) will ever require this, because
| everyone just uses Bluetooth these days and noone else uses the
| iPod Nano 7g :-)
|
| 1: https://tinymicros.com/wiki/Apple_iPod_Remote_Protocol
| mozempthrowaway wrote:
| Mozilla
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Our parent company had had an amazing idea, we'd license this
| great relevant video content, make it available for you to put on
| your website, and it would show our adverts around it.
|
| We licenced a Flash based video player, and I had to make it a)
| work in general and b) show video adverts before after during the
| content.
|
| I spent six months learning Actionscript 3, getting the goddamn
| player code to build and run, (the Ant build script came with the
| dev's homedir baked in everywhere) came up with a way to unit
| test it via some monkey patching etc. etc. Files called 'blank-
| single-frame.flv' were created to work around concurrency bugs
| deep in the player, etc etc.
|
| We released it and then I saw the "content". Pure garbage. Our
| content partner had scraped together a desperate collection of
| free videos like "Frankfurt Airport shareholder update", not the
| stuff like "Germany's Next Top Model" we'd been promised by the
| excited executive.
|
| I'm not sure who fucked over who here, but I'm pretty sure there
| was a very boozy dinner and possibly some cocaine involved in
| forming this "partnership".
|
| So yeah, six months making a videoplayer work to show adverts
| around videos no-one wanted.
|
| Can't even justify it based on what I learned cos Flash lol.
| shireboy wrote:
| This is old, but my most pointless project: The CEO wanted a
| screen in every hall that showed the company "EnGUAGEment meter".
| Users would have to go to the app, choose from 10 or so canned
| messages like "Feeling productive", "Ready to conquer the day",
| and other such HR speak the CEO (or rather the HR committee he
| put on the important business of picking the list) felt was
| motivational. This would update a page that scrolled their photos
| and chosen message, and showed the "EnGUAGEment" as a percent of
| total employees responding on a car dashboard style guage. It
| hovered around 30-40% every day. On the CEO's birthday they'd
| drive that baby up to 70 to 80%
| AlexDragusin wrote:
| Bill Lumbergh approves of this!
| shireboy wrote:
| Very much so. Also Michael Scott. This was a period of my
| life when I wanted to like The Office, but it was just too
| realistic for me.
| tukajo wrote:
| This is the funniest thing I think I've read all day.
|
| Thank you.
| mjcohen wrote:
| I once worked on adding a feature to a radar processor. After a
| number of months and getting it working, it was cancelled. At
| least the checks didn't bounce.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| Was this anything like other radar projects I've heard of? Did
| it working have unexpected but significant national security
| implications with the whole thing needing to be urgently
| reframed or "important" people would be at risk of looking
| bad...
| emerongi wrote:
| Spent months building an application that I knew would never ever
| be used by anyone. It was actually highly stressful as for some
| reason it was considered a big opportunity and I was pressured to
| deliver quicker. I was young and didn't know how to deal with
| that.
| leoh wrote:
| Stuff at Google X
| fschuett wrote:
| I worked on a tool to digitize the German land registry, only to
| later get notified that they already had such a tool, so my work
| was completely useless. Worked on that for about 8 months, at
| least I got a bit of payment because I did it on the job.
| Currently the digitization of the German land registry is done in
| PDF format, which is of course horrible and my taxes are right
| now paying for people manually copying and pasting text from PDF
| documents.
|
| I was employed as a simple office clerk (I had failed to start my
| own startup and needed any job to get some money at the time) and
| was told to do the same as everyone else, copying text from the
| PDF, rewriting the text according to legal guidelines and pasting
| it into an ArcGIS-based software. Meanwhile the ArcGIS-based
| software I was supposed to paste into crashed every 30 minutes.
| So the only way I saw to actually do my job was to write a
| digitization tool for the PDF documents. Since I had internal
| access to government documents (which aren't publicly available
| to anyone of course) I saw it as a way to build my portfolio and
| put the project on my resume to find a better job afterwards
| (which I did). I had a good manager who allowed me sudo access
| (my state used Linux, yay!), so I got to work.
|
| After about 6 months I had a full GUI tool written and digitized
| about 100 PDF files. The software can digitize from PDF to JSON,
| then ran a python.wasm VM over the digitized JSON in order to
| rewrite the texts according to the (constantly changing) legal
| guidelines. Then I also "hacked" the ArcGIS-based software with a
| HTTP middleman logging server and found out that it was just
| submitting XML requests to an endpoint, so I wrote a tool to
| batch upload the JSON documents directly into the database
| instead of having to launch ArcGIS. In the end I also wrote a
| management server that used libgit2 to create diffs between legal
| document (i.e. creating Grundbuchanderungsmitteilungen via git
| diff), I am very proud of this because it's cool, although the
| chance of ever getting official approval was almost zero (but hey
| I thought it was cool).
|
| I was hoping I could somehow sell my tool and support for it to
| the government, since the project of land registry digitization
| has currently taken over 20 years[1] and it's still not finished.
| Apparently the problem is that some bureaucrats want to make the
| absolute perfect data model and only release the software once
| the data model is perfect (which is basically never going to
| happen). My approach of making an extensible JSON-based model for
| now to just translate the PDFs - and then adapting it for use-
| cases later was rejected because, well, I am not a multi-million
| dollar company and I sadly failed to impress the government with
| my skills. Long story short, after about 8 months of work I was
| given rights to my program (even though I wrote it on government
| payroll, technically) but it was rejected. Oh well, at least I
| got a nice academic article[2] avoided shooting my brain out from
| boredom copying and pasting text and also advanced my career
| somewhat.
|
| In case anyone needs such a tool, it's licensed GPL3 over at
| https://grundbuch-test.eu/
|
| [1] https://www.grundbuch.eu/nachrichten/
|
| [2] https://geodaesie.info/zfv/zfv-
| archiv/zfv-147-jahrgang/zfv-2... (page 4)
| eigenman wrote:
| Once I was working on a government funded small business grant
| trying to do something that was mathematically impossible (and
| literally the first example of intractability in textbooks of the
| field). The only goal was for the company to collect overhead.
|
| (Queue Rick and Morty butter getting robot meme.)
|
| What is my purpose?
|
| To collect overhead.
|
| Oh my god.
| majikandy wrote:
| The ones who didn't pay me.
| throw310822 wrote:
| I worked for ten months for a bank, in a team of about ten people
| (mostly external consultants, so pretty expensive), to build some
| new feature of their customer website. The feature had been
| proposed as part of some internal initiative and was pretty much
| useless. From the start it was clear that the project manager
| hadn't understood at all the concept of what we were asked to
| build, and even after several months and a lot of explanation he
| was still proposing stuff that showed the same misunderstanding
| of the concept; the feature consisted of all of three or four
| views, but the designs were constantly changing (despite being
| almost childishly simple), the huge monorepo was so badly set up
| that each hot-reload took several minutes, and the backend needed
| to go through an insane amount of bureaucracy.
|
| In the end, we managed to produce three working web pages, and
| then the team was disbanded and the project shelved. The whole
| thing might have costed the company a million or more. Pretty
| sad, but now I tell people that I know why the interest rates of
| their bank accounts are zero.
| tomdell wrote:
| I spent the past two and a half years building prototype features
| for a large internal application. One month ago, the CFO decided
| that as a part of organizational restructuring, the company will
| no longer invest in the application. New development on it is
| ending, and the entire application may potentially be deprecated
| at some point in the future in favor of cheap dashboards.
|
| I am being moved to the team that builds the cheap dashboards
| (I'm not happy about it). Among all the prototype work I did,
| only one significant project has made it into production - the
| others were continually iterated on for a couple of years, and
| though some of them have a highly engaged and appreciative beta
| userbase within the company, I am not allowed to do much more
| development on them, and they will be taken out of my hands at
| some point and passed off to other teams.
| longjohnlarry wrote:
| I'm sorry to say this, but I think you're going to be laid off
| at some point.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| A standalone Matrix chat client for Windows 95:
| https://imgs.club/2d8372d72d98e4bb6e13aee05ed70ae6
| culopatin wrote:
| 70% of what I do at work
| Aloha wrote:
| I pretty regularly produce documents which are required by
| process but no longer have a consumer. I make them because I get
| yelled at if I dont, but the 'product' I output is basically
| useless - including for the original use (which has been replaced
| by another similar, yet different document).
|
| I've also implemented hours of design work for a feature the
| customer later decided they didnt want.
|
| Oh well, I get paid the same anyhow.
| tenken wrote:
| Spent the last 1-2 years building a survey tool for a campus in-
| house using a CMS. Did so using CI pipelines which aren't trendy
| at my campus.
|
| 2 quarters (4 months) from release campus decides to buy an
| Internet SaaS product. And the in-house project was shelved
| completely never to be touched now.
|
| Imma really the integration lead for the campus with the SaaS
| vendor. But it turns out the SaaS product cannot create the
| Reports we want, nor is it granular enough in other aspects for
| our needs compared to our in-house legacy offering.
|
| Se la vi.
| klntsky wrote:
| I made a browser extension that allows scripting short webpage
| interaction scenarios[0] using a custom DSL. The DSL allows to
| point to elements using on-screen labels, similarly to trydactil,
| pentadactyl and such. The DSL actions are essentially functions
| that accept arguments, for example one can describe something
| like "enter 'foo' in google search field and press the button"
| with a script line similar to: "|'foo'a c", where 'a' and 'c'
| correspond to labels on the screen.
|
| These scenario descriptions can then be bound to hotkeys.
|
| I decided to embed a LISP into the extension, but while building
| the interpreter[1] I realized that the DSL is already too complex
| for everyday use, and I haven't really used it to automate
| anything.
|
| I am the only user of this addon.
|
| [0] https://github.com/axes-webext/axes [1]
| https://gitlab.com/kiniro/
| underdeserver wrote:
| Regarding OP's story, deprecated is just another word for
| "stable".
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I'm dead serious here, but if you are working on something
| useless do anything in your power to change that. Never work on
| something that's for sure going to be useless. Sometimes things
| become useless later, or don't pan out, and that's fine. But
| you're dead in the water if you aren't in a position to avoid
| working on something you know is useless. In fact you really
| shouldn't be working on something that isn't the MOST useful
| thing you could be doing.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| have formerly done gov r&d. no further elaboration needed
| throwawayX995 wrote:
| We were building SD WAN. There was a brilliant evangelist
| spinning the story of how we were going to change the world with
| our new in house product. He listed off the features it would
| have, and I asked if our customers requested those features. He
| blew right by my question without even acknowledging me. There
| was a feeling in the room like I was being obtuse and asking
| silly questions. The implication was that the smart people in the
| room all understood why this was going to be big, and I had
| better keep my mouth shut and try to keep up.
|
| To make sure the project was successful, we contracted the actual
| work out to BigCorp. I pointed out they were already selling a
| product in this space - we would be hiring them to build their
| own competition. No one seemed too worried.
|
| Lots of money, lots of time, lots of progress reports, lots of
| calls with enthusiastic sales people. Nothing ever resembling a
| functional product came out of it. When it finally got cancelled
| I heaved a sigh of relief.
| ajot wrote:
| My PhD thesis (ETA: TBA)
| SergeAx wrote:
| In data-driven product development, they use A/B experiments to
| determine if a new feature will improve some key metric in the
| long run and also will not impair other key metrics. Several
| teams may run tens of experiments at the same time. In mature
| products, 80%-90% of these experiments' outcomes are zero or
| negative and their code is wiped out to keep the codebase
| unclogged.
|
| When I was working in such a company, I warned people in the
| interview that most likely 80% of the code they write will be
| thrown away. It is surprisingly hard to cope with.
| rgmerk wrote:
| I spent much of 2023 writing the code for our company to
| implement the changes in the new version of this standards
| document:
|
| https://www.frc.org.uk/library/standards-codes-policy/actuar...
|
| As far as getting paid to write code in our industry goes, it was
| quite enjoyable. Most of the code was totally new and not
| particularly tightly coupled with the rest of the system, so the
| challenges were in understanding the subtleties of the
| requirements and coming up with a clean and performant design
| rather than fighting legacy code.
|
| Touch wood, I've done a reasonable job. We got it done a couple
| of months before it was required and a full dry run with our
| entire customer base only found one pretty subtle edge case that
| I'd missed.
|
| So we get to keep our license to look after billions of pounds of
| customers retirement savings, which is kinda important, and
| because I worked on this other developers got to work on stuff
| that actually helps our customers (which is important for our
| customers, and ensuring that our business retains and expands
| said customer base).
|
| However, the new version of the regulations, while written with
| the laudable intention of providing people with more accurate and
| unbiased information about how much money they will have on
| retirement, achieve nothing of the sort. It just replaces one set
| of assumptions that are wrong on some edge cases, with another
| set of assumptions that are wrong on a different set of edge
| cases, in some cases arguably wrong in worse ways. Nor does it
| address the real weaknesses in these statements.
|
| And across the industry, there are literally dozens of companies
| who had developers who spent similar amounts of time to me
| implementing this new standard, for no benefit of any of their
| customers that I can discern either.
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