[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 : 635 points
Date : 2024-04-05 13:53 UTC (1 days 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.
| Froedlich wrote:
| Yeah, that's the usual response when someone doesn't have much
| data to keep track of, or thinks they can "just google it" to
| find something again.
|
| I have a "knowledge management" system I put together over the
| years, based on a subset of HTML. Because if you can't find
| something, you're just wasting storage space.
| 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?
| komali2 wrote:
| For me, yes of course! I do that in my spare time on FOSS
| projects.
| 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.
| WatchDog wrote:
| Morality wise isn't it the opposite? If you own the
| business, it's your money to waste If you work for the
| business you are wasting others money.
| ornornor wrote:
| If you work for someone else and carry out your tasks as
| instructed, and have tried to bring up the absurdity of
| it all as specced but they insist you do it anyway then I
| don't see what would be unethical about it? Only talking
| about brain dead/useless endeavors, not bad/evil
| projects.
| 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...
| vundercind wrote:
| It's goddamn rare to work on something useful.
|
| I'm not sure more than 50% of the code I've written in about 20
| years of this was ever actually used by someone who wasn't,
| like, working on the project.
|
| Much of the rest shouldn't have been written. Total waste,
| usually easy to see.
|
| A lot more that's basically just rearranging shit for little
| reason.
|
| Yeah... very little was useful.
|
| At some point you just have to stop giving a shit. You'll pay
| me _how_ much to dig a hole then fill it back up over and
| over?! Sure thing, how deep do you want it?
| 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.
| fatnoah wrote:
| It was actually my second gig working on that as well. The
| first was a college internship writing management software
| for a 14 slot switch w/75Gb backplane. The best feature of
| the software was the "suit" command, which restarted the
| boards in all 14 slots in sequence, which created a nice
| light show. We used it whenever someone in a suit showed up
| in the lab.
| 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?!
| sspiff wrote:
| No I'm looking for a small lisp to embed in a useless
| project of my own
| 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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| You may be interested in a friend's product:
|
| https://github.com/tjhorner/upsy-desky
| 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...")
| bombcar wrote:
| It's worse when you're maintaining and entire system to
| generate one page in one report that is attached to the end
| of a board document once a year.
|
| If the report stayed identical for ten years it's likely
| nobody would notice or care.
| 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!
| charles_f wrote:
| Never said it was the smartest investment, but it's not
| useless
| joshstrange wrote:
| The idea of maintaining something that no one uses sounds
| horrible but so is supporting something 1-5 (often on the lower
| end of that range) people use.
|
| I worked indirectly for an online gambling company and they
| maintained multiple interfaces to their underlying gambling
| system because there were whales (aka big spenders) who had
| gotten used to the old interface and didn't want to change.
|
| Imagine if every redesign/refresh actually had to be a new
| product and you left the old version alone running in parallel.
| This company also wanted to do a lot of redesigns or re-
| imaginings, or a new platform that would "replace all the
| existing ones" (spoiler: it didn't).
|
| They had at least 5 different products running that all talked
| to the same backend but had to be updated occasionally to keep
| them working.
|
| Also, they had a backend system that did a lot of low-level
| handling of customer data, it had an API but you weren't
| allowed to talk to it directly. No, you needed to call this php
| api which talked to it and spit out the results (well,
| different format, but the results). But wait, there is more.
| Over the years they had php code calling php code (over HTTP)
| calling php code because they didn't want to QA new
| interactions with lower levels. Since the existing stuff was
| "battle tested" all you could do was call the next layer down
| until one day your layer also got an effective code freeze. It
| was maddening. Oh! And each layer had its own validation, so
| imagine the fun of identifying at which layer your input was
| reject at and why. Data and errors/responses were mangled at
| every level.
|
| Without knowing about all of these layers, as a contractor, I
| called the lowest level api since it had the most raw data
| (each layer normally lost some of the data or
| consolidated/summarized it in some way). I was told I shouldn't
| call those api endpoints, instead call these ones. The higher
| layers required more calls and even with all of that some data
| just wasn't available. Making my stuff worse while having to
| work with worse endpoints really sucked.
| 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.
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| Roulette is a losing game no matter how you play it. There
| was a time when you could increase your odds by the last few
| percent to take an advantage by playing old and unbalanced
| wheels. As you could bet based on the state of the wheel and
| there were greater odds of a section of the wheel hitting.
| Casinos are aware of this now though and have upgraded to
| self-leveling wheels and replace them sooner before they have
| a chance to wear down.
|
| Here is an interesting read about it:
| https://thehustle.co/professor-who-beat-roulette
| 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.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| All software is DOA, its replacement just hasn't been built
| yet.
| 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...
| joshstrange wrote:
| I actually think it's worse.
|
| Even insecure people will take better code in most
| circumstances. Maybe after adding their own touches to it so
| it doesn't seem like you got it right or came up with a good
| solution on your own.
|
| It's the ones that don't understand the change and don't want
| to admit it that are the real problem. "Too disruptive = I
| don't understand this and don't know how to support it", if,
| in fact, it was a simple search->hash map change which any
| developer should be able to grok.
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| Objective-C++ already is a system for dispatching calls with a
| hashtable. Did they need another one?
| pjscott wrote:
| Objective C is a system for that; Objective C++ is at least
| _three_ systems for dispatching calls in ways that don 't
| involve linear search. Not sure why they'd try to make
| another one.
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| A consulting firm I worked with had great sales people.
|
| They could get software consultants anywhere, especially
| where they were not needed.
|
| A former colleague of mine got assigned along another to
| assist an Italian bank with their software projects.
|
| He told me that in his office there were 6/8 people, barely
| doing any work. Two of them were leads in that office and did
| their best to never ever be seen or meet anyone. They would
| just close themselves in the office the whole day doing god
| knows what. If you knocked they would pretend to not be
| there.
|
| My colleagues tried to get some work to do desperately for
| months, but consultancy said to shut up because the contract
| was huge.
|
| He says it was one of the most miserable periods of his life
| because "there's enough Youtube a person can watch for 18
| months" and there were more than 2 hours per day of commuting
| on top of that.
| replwoacause wrote:
| I can attest to this phenomenon too.
| spit2wind wrote:
| This reduces to a belief, which I also hold, that you have
| inherent worth.
|
| It's like Bret Victor's story of Puddles. Imagine you adopt a
| puppy. You name him Puddles. You take puddles home and you
| give them a little snack and you stick puddles in the cage
| and you lock the door forever and never open it again. Most,
| although not all, would agree this is cruel.
|
| We have a notion of what it means to live a full doggy life.
| Dogs have to run around. They sniff other dogs and they pee
| on things. That's kind of what it means to be a dog. Dogs
| have a set of capabilities and we recognize that a dog has to
| be allowed the full free expression of its entire range of
| capabilities in order to be a dog.
|
| The same is true for people. Like a dog needs to hunt, people
| seek meaning. They wither away without it.
|
| https://vimeo.com/115154289
| 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.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Another alternative is to become actually useful in that
| spare time.
|
| Doing what depends on the business - it can take some
| detective work to figure it out.
|
| Then again, the detective work could quickly show this is
| someplace you don't want to be long-term.
|
| In which case yeah, find something productive to do, or treat
| this as that paid learning time to build some new skills.
|
| Best part of learning is test it's defensible ... "oh, I'm
| busy doing an assessment on the pros and cons of rewriting
| the system using node.js. "
| langsoul-com wrote:
| You cannot legally do 1 or 2. They'd both belong to the
| company because ip work laws
| alfanick wrote:
| That purely depends on jurisdiction (country, there is no
| world universal law) and your contract. A lot of companies
| smuggle that in a contract, often they're happy to drop
| these kind of clauses.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Depends on the country.
| 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.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Well clearly you should have thrown that away not long after
| they left! :)
| kristjansson wrote:
| Exactly. Go to an artist's studio. Look at all the sketches,
| the rack of canvases in the corner, the detritus of creation
| all around.
|
| Software, and product development in general, is ultimately a
| creative endeavor. A nontrivial portion of attempts end up in
| the trash.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| A proof of concept is t really the same thing as a lot of the
| stories here because the entire point of a POC is to literally
| prove if a concept works (the clue is in the name). If a
| concept doesn't work then that's still a successful POC because
| you've then saved more time that would have been spent building
| out a MVP.
| 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.
| ch33zer wrote:
| This sounds illegal. I love it.
| 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?
| windowshopping wrote:
| It seems they all do, though. Digital ocean was the same.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Any decent VPS provider (including DigitalOcean, unless
| they've changed anything) definitely doesn't do this.
| windowshopping wrote:
| Maybe you're right, I may be mistaken. Perhaps I should
| migrate to DO.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Actually, I should qualify this.
|
| If you use a PaaS (platform as a service, e.g. Heroku, DO
| App Platform, AWS EB), they might assume your app to be
| stateless and do things like restart it at will.
|
| If you use a VPS (virtual private server, e.g. DO
| Droplet, AWS EC2), this certainly shouldn't happen, but
| of course it requires some Linux skills to maintain your
| VPS.
|
| So it's basically a trade-off between engineering your
| app to fit a PaaS or hand-managing your VMs (though the
| latter is usually the cheaper option).
| windowshopping wrote:
| Yeah, indeed. I can try using a Droplet but I'm just new
| to managing a VM by hand. I've always used a PaaS for my
| projects so ensuring uptime and whatever other
| responsibilities there may be is new for me.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Data persistence is a solved problem. "Server that never
| fails or reboots" is not.
| 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.
| all2 wrote:
| Linode is super cheap. I pay 6 or 7 bucks a month for a
| bottom tier VM.
| windowshopping wrote:
| I guess I just haven't done anything outside of a PaaS
| before and I'm a bit worried about unknown unknowns. I'm
| sure I'm probably up to the task but managing my own
| server is just new ground for me. I'll have to research
| how to ensure that the server is always up or recovers
| from an unexpected failure and restarts immediately.
| jakemauer wrote:
| You can also split the difference and run Dokku[0] on a
| vps and basically host your own instance of "Heroku". It
| can even use the same build packs and procfiles.
|
| Feel free to message me and I'd be happy to help with
| server stuff.
|
| [0] https://dokku.com/
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| Fly.io would probably work for your use case. Doesn't
| have the restart limit of Heroku and still has a solid
| enough free tier to run your app!
|
| I'd be happy to help if you need anything! Whether
| hosting or just backend related questions!
|
| Also depending on how hard coded your architecture is,
| maybe you can separate out the Magic specific data from
| the app itself? So the MTG specific data could just be
| loaded as a datapack?
| anurag wrote:
| Render (render.com; I'm the founder) doesn't restart your
| server every 24 hours like Heroku; it does restart it
| automatically if it crashes.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Architect a redundant cluster and let a peer server take
| over as master?
| exikyut wrote:
| I would second the recommendation to move off Heroku.
| They're essentially the smallest scale version of vendor
| lock-in out there nowadays, especially considering they're
| no longer free.
|
| An open-sourced codedump will survive best if people (which
| effectively means "average technically-minded MTG player"
| in this case) can run it wherever they're most comfortable
| - which will almost certainly be something that smells like
| a VPS. Mayyybe a container.
| 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...
| hhshhhhjjjd wrote:
| Alpha beta unlimited revised Arabian nights 4th edition
| ice age mirage etc etc. I'm sure that's all wrong but I
| used to know it by heart. I keep my cards in old
| motherboard boxes !
| 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.
| vaylian wrote:
| You are right that they currently don't create core sets
| any more. I wouldn't be surprised if they change their
| mind /again/ in the future.
|
| See also: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Core_set
| 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.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Isn't there a free starter deck you can get from game stores?
| xoxxala wrote:
| Magic has changed drastically the last few years. I tried to
| get back into it and the best set I found was Jump Start
| 2022.
|
| Alternatively, Star Wars Unlimited just released their first
| set. The starter set has two balanced decks (Vader vs Luke)
| with some staple cards that can be used in a bunch of
| different decks with boosters. Gameplay is Magic-esque, but
| smoothed out (no land issues since any card can be turned
| into a resource, no instants/stack shenanigans, and actions
| pass back and forth so constant engagement).
|
| There's a free to play version at
| https://www.forcetable.net/swu using the starter decks.
| Izkata wrote:
| Fun fact, Commander was a fan-made format that WotC
| eventually adopted and made official. It existed (even under
| that name despite what people online say now) in the mid/late
| 2000s when I learned of it during college.
| hasanas wrote:
| Indeed, things have changed about a year ago.
|
| Here is a small blogpost by WotC: https://magic.wizards.com/e
| n/news/announcements/revitalizing...
| mosew wrote:
| Play premodern. In addition to having the best gameplay, the
| card pool is closed so you don't have to worry about
| acquiring new cards.
|
| https://premodernmagic.com
| 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
| windowshopping wrote:
| Oh I didn't implement a rules engine, that would be
| impractical. It's a freeform platform that gives you all
| the tools needed to use every mechanic in the game, but
| it's up to you to actually _follow the rules._ No different
| from playing in person with real cards. It 's sort of like
| a drag and drop sandbox with a lot of extra features around
| the edges. It's a vastly improved version of Untap.in.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| If you do not implement the actual rules, then it can
| probably be made to support many other kind of card games
| too.
|
| However, I would be interested to have a FOSS rule engine
| of Magic: the Gathering, preferably written in C, and
| licensed by AGPL3 or some compatible license. But,
| unfortunately there is no official FOSS implementation;
| if there was (at least of the rule engine; not
| necessarily the UI) (especially if literate programming
| is used for the rule engine), I think that it would be
| better since the rules can be made more precise.
|
| I would want to ensure that the rule engine has no
| pictures at all (you can easily download pictures
| separately if you want them, anyways; so the rule engine
| doesn't need them and shouldn't have them).
| A1kmm wrote:
| Obviously not legal advice for anyone, but the general
| consensus seems to be that in many countries (including the
| United States where WotC are based) game mechanics are not
| copyrightable. This interpretation has been stated publicly
| by the US Copyright Office: https://web.archive.org/web/20161
| 122174519/http://www.copyri...
|
| Obviously the name can be trademarked, and text (e.g. the
| names / descriptions of things, the specific expression of
| the rules) and images (e.g. card art) can be copyrighted.
|
| There is a long history of clones of games with the exact
| same mechanics, but with everything renamed and the artwork
| changed.
|
| Occasionally, there are attempts to patent mechanics.
|
| So it wouldn't necessarily be a problem if GP was to rename
| the game, change all the card artwork, make sure no
| instructions from the original game are used in the new game,
| and rename all the cards and concepts in an isomorphic way
| (i.e. a 1:1 mapping between MtG and whatever the new game is
| called). That way, it could be a completely new game which
| happens to have the same mechanics as MtG, but isn't a
| derivative of it legally.
|
| It would be possible to speculate what WoTC would do in that
| case, but hard to know for sure. Most likely, they'd probably
| just ignore it if it isn't using their trademark, artwork,
| descriptions and so on. They could send a blusterous C&D
| letter to try their luck if they were particularly worried.
| If the GP got such a letter and ignored it, or replied
| explaining that their game does not reuse any copyrightable
| elements, they'd probably just back down. If they really
| decided to take it to court, they could try to hope it goes
| more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spry_Fox%2C_LLC_v._Lo
| lapps%2C_.... than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_East_US
| A,_Inc._v._Epyx,_I.... (although they'd probably have a
| harder road given Spry Fox was largely based on the visual
| look-and-feel, which would be a longer bow to draw when
| saying a computer game infringes on a card game).
|
| Obviously, none of this is legal advice, and the
| circumstances could differ depending on facts like where it
| is hosted / where GP lives, and the exact details of the game
| engine or how similar artwork was.
| 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.
| windowshopping wrote:
| The problem as I see it is loading the card data and imagery.
| I use scryfall for this, and it's heavily integrated into the
| site in several ways. I don't see how I can get around that.
| My site is coded specifically to work with their API. I can't
| really make it so you can "swap it out" for a different
| game's API.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Cockatrice also loads card images and card text likely from
| the same source
| Kharacternyk wrote:
| By being generic and customizable it will have the potential
| to become a great new game in its own right. Let the
| community begin with something they already know and love
| (MtG) and watch them coming up with cool new stuff.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| If it doesn't handle the card rules automatically for you,
| then it's way worse than MTG Arena or MTGO. I've played with
| free MTG software (cockatrice) and it's not close to the same
| thing, even though it has all the art and buttons for doing
| all the effects manually (I use this shortcut to draw 3
| cards, this shortcut to put 2 back, this shortcut to exile
| someone's graveyard, etc).
|
| If they really built the best site for playing MTG, even over
| paid versions, then there's no real way to hide the fact that
| it's magic-specific.
| windowshopping wrote:
| I'm not competing with Arena. Arena has a rules engine and
| great graphics. But Arena has a tonnnn of limitations and
| does not let you simply "build any deck you want and play
| with any number of friends in any format you choose." For
| what Arena is meant to do, Arena is better. That was never
| my goal.
|
| I'm competing with Untap.in and Cockatrice, and what I
| built is just a much, much nicer version of those things.
| If you give me your email, I'll send you a link to it and
| you can try it out yourself if you'd like.
| 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.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Please release it anonymously. I beg you
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Also, how come Wizards don't go after Cockatrice, but would go
| after your site?
| windowshopping wrote:
| They did go after Cockatrice. The original developer had to
| step away. It's unclear what the current situation is with
| whoever stepped up to take it over.
| roland35 wrote:
| Maybe adapt it to your own game? Just look how Balatro blew up!
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| Cockatrice has been around for a while without getting a C&D.
| They separate the game client from the card images to get
| around it. Could do similar.
| Biganon wrote:
| I made a website about Tintin (the Belgian comic) where you can
| search any cell from any album by its text content. There's
| also a game where you have to find which album a cell comes
| from.
|
| The owners of the intellectual property wrote to me and just
| asked that I stop using the domain name I was using (which was
| the name of a character) and that every cell contains a
| reference to them ("Tintin is copyrighted to blah blah blah").
| I obliged and haven't heard of them ever since.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Great blistering barnacles! That's quite a story. Would you
| mind posting the link to your site here? I'm very curious to
| see it.
| Biganon wrote:
| Sure, it's https://www.ectoplasme.com/
|
| (It's in French, should have mentioned that)
| dhosek wrote:
| Kind of reminds me of how my brother built a website for
| playing scrabble online, but because of the obvious
| trademark/copyright issues, he made it a private site behind an
| invite-only login. I don't know if it's still running, but
| because he was working on and off writing for TV at the time
| and doing tech support for a lot of Hollywood types, a lot of
| the users were Hollywood folks including a number of names of
| people that you'd recognize.
| 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.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Now you've got me thinking about 'Parasite as a Service'.
| sirspacey wrote:
| Is this... microSaaS?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| No cleantech???
| theragra wrote:
| The difference between startup and bullshit is pretty blurry,
| no?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| There's the question of intent, but maybe this guy believes
| his own bullshit.
| bombcar wrote:
| He's selling a product! Investors want bullshit, and he's
| providing the bill.
| yazzku wrote:
| It's a bull market.
| 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.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| Web scale!
| rickcarlino wrote:
| All servers are running on a K8S cluster in AWS. My monthly
| hosting bill is only about $1200 a month. Well worth it.
| sage76 wrote:
| Nice. How does it send the mail? Do you need a local mailserver
| running?
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I wrote this like five years ago so memory is fuzzy, but if I
| remember correctly I was using PHP send mail and every time
| Barry would bark it would do an HTTP post to a PHP endpoint.
| 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.
| roland35 wrote:
| Yup exactly, sometimes you should try new things. They
| don't always work out. Although in this case it seemed like
| an expensive mistake...
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I'm wondering if the CEO just understands their clients will
| buy more products if they have "AI" in the title, even if
| it's pointless.
|
| Your job isn't to make good software, it's to make profitable
| software.
| angarg12 wrote:
| This was an internal tool, so no use in fluffy marketing.
| angarg12 wrote:
| I think this was a folly by our director. About a year after
| I left I learnt that he had "left to pursue other
| opportunities", which is corporate speak for "he got canned".
| 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.
| Froedlich wrote:
| If you get assigned to something like that, own it, no matter
| how useless it is. It's an opportunity to bulk up your resume
| for free.
| bombcar wrote:
| Just put the original code in an ML wrapper, add some if
| statements and presto - done!
| 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
| StefanBatory wrote:
| That stereotype is ancient. I've first heard it like 15 years
| ago.
| Biganon wrote:
| Humor? In my Hacker News?
| 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...
| bombcar wrote:
| Many people merge without using turn signals, but the
| subset that do it where you will notice it (e.g, close to
| you) seem to often be in BMWs.
|
| I don't know if anyone has ever actually done a study.
| Would be amusing.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Sounds distinctly like a Bay Area/populated city thing.
| 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.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| A study actually went into this[0]. Or a popular science
| summary of it[1] Assholes really are more
| likely to drive Mercedes or BMWs, study finds It's
| not that all of them are assholes, but according to a new
| study, self-centered men who are argumentative, stubborn, and
| overall disagreeable are much more likely to own a high-
| status car such as an Audi, BMW or Mercedes.
|
| [0]
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ijop.12642
|
| [1] https://www.zmescience.com/science/psychology-
| science/asshol...
| 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.
| wwilim wrote:
| I test drove a 1 series in 2018 and it still worked like that
| jacamera wrote:
| Yup, I remember when I got a loaner car that had those new
| momentary switches and I couldn't believe how terrible they
| were. What made it all the more baffling/disappointing was
| that earlier BMWs had some of the nicest turn signal switches
| available that were so satisfying to use.
| 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.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| I was a top 0.1% salesperson nationwide in car sales. I
| read a bunch of lean startup stuff, learned to make a
| minimum viable product, and then started selling to
| companies with 20-80 employees. I'm likable and good at
| selling, so I got 34 companies using this garbage I made.
| It's the worst nightmare ever to keep people motivated to
| use it, keep fixing things I made as a rookie developer,
| keep adding or saying no to features.
|
| Overall the product isn't really needed, and sorta sucks
| too. If I was an typical developer trying to pitch a
| startup idea to businesses, it probably would have never
| got off the ground and nobody would have wasted any time.
| Maybe eventually the developer would have landed on an idea
| so good it had REAL PMF, and made that.
|
| But no, instead I sold some garbage and now I'm stuck
| working on it. There is such a thing as being too good at
| sales. You don't want sales talking people into bad ideas.
| tomcam wrote:
| Amazing story. Love your honesty.
|
| Is there a world where you hire someone to build a more
| maintainable replacement?
| talldatethrow wrote:
| It really wouldn't solve the main problem which is that
| the product itself isn't really needed or that great,
| code quality aside.
| jononor wrote:
| Hehe, reap what you sow :) But - you are not really stuck
| though. If you have managed to go from 0 to 34 customers
| before you can do it again. It is totally an option to
| drop that product and/or startup, and go with a better
| one (guided by your learnings). Up to you to decide what
| is the best way forward :)
| randomdata wrote:
| _> now I 'm stuck working on it. _
|
| Why not put those sales skills to work and sell the
| business to someone else?
| talldatethrow wrote:
| Because there's a difference between selling a rough car
| you detail inside and out and sell for a good deal,
| versus selling a lemon.
|
| Deep down I know the product isn't that well liked, and a
| lot of the renewals are based on my salesmanship. I know
| I have a chance at fixing the bugs, because I wrote
| everything, while someone else would be screwed IMO. It
| just wouldn't be fair to sell it to someone because I
| know they'd be making a mistake.
| codingdave wrote:
| It sounds like you are underestimating pretty much this
| entire industry. Picking up codebases that are sketchy
| and new to us is just part of the job. Finding and fixing
| bugs is an exercise to get rolling, not an insurmountable
| challenge.
|
| When people keep using software, it is because it solves
| a problem. They might not like the software but
| begrudgingly use it anyway because it solves that
| problem. So sure, pat yourself on the back for good
| salesmanship, but also realize that they keep using it
| because even if it is covered in warts, it still does the
| job.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| This is hilarious. Can you describe the product or what
| it does? Is it something to do with payroll, benefits, or
| HR?
| 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.
| epr wrote:
| > Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
|
| Depends on the type of sales. A pretty good indicator is how
| many times a customer makes a purchase from the same
| salesperson. If it's just one purchase (like ERP consulting)
| it could be grifty/etc like in this case. If they're buying
| from the same guy for years, there's often very different
| types of salespeople. I used to think all salespeople fit the
| sketchy used car salesman type, but after working with great
| salespeople I know better. This is a big blind spot for us
| techical/engineering types.
| raincom wrote:
| When you are working with the same sales people multiple
| times, it is an instance of treated prisoners dilemma. Used
| car salesman is just one time prisoners dilemma.
| taneq wrote:
| They're not even lying, usually. They just don't have the
| expertise to tell the customer exactly what they can't have.
| That's why you have sales people.
| 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.
| 8b16380d wrote:
| Or "it's best to wait till the migration complete before
| our team needs to do anything"
| highwaylights wrote:
| The latter half of your sentence suggests this project may
| actually have been a roaring success (for the vendor).
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Depends on the vendor's goals. If it's to fatten and
| butcher a pig, and never see any future work from them,
| sure. If the vendor is hoping to have a sustained
| profitable relationship then not so much.
| 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
| nilamo wrote:
| Or refusing to use anything except Office 2003 because
| newer versions are too different...
| 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I'm in small and medium business. A lot of homegrown and
| unique processes that are just dandy. I mean it they're
| fine. But when faced by things like standard GAAP
| accounting processes, or even EDI. You can't argue with
| it. You can't tell walmart oh no well actually I didn't
| mean to send that 850. It costs you money. You can't
| willy nilly charge credit cards anymore. Its just life.
| It makes it hard for them not just in IT but also to hire
| new people or replace retiring ones. Only Bob knew this
| process.
|
| What makes the clients we work with great and unique and
| what I love is the products they make or the problems
| they solve for customers, but they're not tech companies
| or banks. The ones who succeed are the ones who focus on
| thier core value and core skills and not random
| accounting process X Y or Z.
| wakeforce wrote:
| I work specifically with small and medium businesses too,
| and can echo that sentiment! I'd love to know more about
| what you do. Love working with SMBs but don't know a lot
| of other people in that space.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Its nice. It's certainly not high faluting as a lot of HN
| jobs but I make good money for where I live, our clients
| are mostly regional but a lot of the 50 states have
| customers over the years. Mostly we work on implementing
| and servicing ERP systems. Our differentiator is our
| skillet in integrations and holistic problem solving.
| Since the ERP sits in the middle of almost every IT venn
| diagram, we run into new tech on a weekly basis.
|
| Besides the ERP consulting bit we sell niche solutions in
| our product space. Mostly comms(EDI, ecommerce,etc) or
| payroll/bookkeeping addons.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Especially when the processes are beholden to
| certification authorities (say the FAA, FDA, etc) because
| the processes has to be approved and cert'd from the
| agencies. That's a fun one to unravel and co-ordinate
| getting changed in a timeframe keeping higher managements
| super optimistic timeframe that they decided to commit
| to, say the board, on.
| epolanski wrote:
| I feel the same above technology in general.
|
| E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology,
| rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they
| end up being mediocre their whole career.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I've noticed that the same applies to any large inflexible
| platform, such as the public clouds.
|
| If you do things the "native" way in Azure or AWS, you'll
| be fine, just like millions of other customers.
|
| If you try and make the cloud work like your old data
| centre platform, then you'll have a bad time.
|
| I just watched a customer spend $2M to deploy software
| routers to replace the "bad" cloud-native routers. Now
| everything is more difficult, slower, and just all-round
| bad. But they "had" to do it. (Narrator: No, they didn't.)
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I usually ask, is it a differentiator for our business to
| run X?
| thayne wrote:
| The problem is it is often very expensive to adapt other
| components to fit the inflexible platform.
|
| In your example, the customer may have had software that
| depended on the routers having some functionality that
| the cloud native routers didn't. Sure if they had
| designed for that cloud from the beginning it wouldn't be
| a big deal. But now, that $2M might be less than the cost
| of changing all their other systems to work around the
| limitations of the cloud native router. I've seen
| situations play out like that a few times.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| That kind of logic seems to make sense at first, but just
| confirms my point: trying to change IPv4 to suit you is a
| fools errand. Change what you do to hit ordinary bog-
| standard IPv4 instead and miraculously you'll have fewer
| impediments.
| jpc0 wrote:
| You clearly have no idea how complex routing is if that
| is your take on this.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| A random state government department has no "business
| needs" that require custom IPv4 routing technology that
| isn't supported by the two biggest public clouds. Any
| such need is imagined, or an outright error.
|
| In this particular case they were sold a product that
| serves one purpose: multi-cloud solutions across
| international boundaries where no single telco can
| connect all of the data centre locations.
|
| Their handful of locations are all in one city and well-
| connected by multiple telcos because... _they 're a state
| government_, not a multi-national corporation. They're
| blocked by the constitution from expanding inter-state,
| let alone internationally. That would be a literal _act
| of war_.
|
| That didn't stop the vendor's sales team showing slides
| with titles like: "What if you need to expand into the
| Chinese market?".
| primax wrote:
| So, basically throw out everything that made them unique
| and differentiated, and do things like the Germans do.
| whstl wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times
| I've been on the receiving end, working at companies
| undergoing a large migration.
|
| It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is
| highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere
| in the system. Death by thousand papercuts.
|
| There is no incentive from both sides to change: the
| company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees
| don't want to change how they work (because change is
| often stressful), and the person paying the bills is not
| getting the full picture.
|
| If there's anything that is actually really "unique" (in
| a good way), then you spend money. Often this means not
| customizing the ERP, but actually writing new software
| that integrates with it.
| AllegedAlec wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is insane cope. We make technology to _assist_ end
| users perform the tasks they do. To say "well you're doing
| the task wrong, the tool is made so you do task X way
| instead" is to put the cart in front of the horse.
| whstl wrote:
| It's not really anyone saying _" you're doing the task
| wrong"_, it's more like _" you're doing it only so
| slightly differently that we need a few months to write
| customizations for it. We'll send you the bill"_.
|
| Those big ERPs are not really blank canvases, but when
| you need those micro-customizations in the wrong place,
| they can become one.
|
| End users involved in the integration don't really want
| to learn new processes or even do things slightly
| different, as they know that changing process often
| involves burning a lot of political capital and they
| often lack awareness to know that "just using the ERP the
| way it's intended" is cheaper. And consultants are
| experts in finding a chance to perform those micro
| changes. It's a perfect marriage.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| A cope with what? Thats literally correct. The tool was
| made to replace 5 assistants, accountants and paper
| pushers. There's a design to this ginormous system that
| works best when you lean into it.
|
| Its why picking the right ERP is very iimportat
| J_cst wrote:
| I understand your point, but that's not how things work.
| If you source the right ERP you will be presented with
| procedures and processes that have been streamlined and
| optimized leveraging previous experiences of literally
| hundreds of businesses. Smaller and larger than yours.
| It's an error to dismiss the standard solution without
| deep consideration. Any process into a good ERP (e.g.
| managing a deposit payment, managing stock, documents
| transformation, uniqueness of product codes, and so on)
| is battle tested and may be ready to solve issues that at
| the moment your company in not seeing, but perhaps will
| have to face with the growth of the next five years and
| in five years perhaps you'll see the reasons why things
| were setup that way into the ERP. I have been happily
| humbled more than once by that. Check how things are
| supposed to work into your ERP, understand them and
| comply. That's how to have a functioning ERP in your
| company. Or just don't buy it and go for excel, it's
| cheaper (but just at the beginning, be warned).
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Not really though. We make technology to make
| SYSTEMs/Processes work, not individual tasks. Take ERP to
| an MRP level (manufacturing resource planning). It
| doesn't matter how it works best for Bob, we need to be
| able to have the part Bob schedules/orders from
| vendors/makes/QAs/builds from lower level parts feed what
| they feed when needed in a way that we can
| consistently/correctly plan, and that follows possible
| certification authorities requirements/pre-approved
| processes. This gets especially complicated on say an
| aerospace production line that has in the high five
| figures of different parts, with complex individual build
| configurations with each component in configurable items
| having it's own lead time, and where everything is JIT
| because otherwise you would have to sit on inventory
| levels worth multiples of what the entire company is
| worth, and every individual item/lot/etc needs to be
| tracked in perpetuity.
| jajko wrote:
| A wonderful statement straight out of ERP's sales guys (or
| other folks on the same side dependent on keeping the cash
| flowing). FYI what we trash here are typical SAP-level
| migrations and all horrible stories that always come with
| it, maybe your tiny company does things better but then its
| a different story in a different market.
|
| I have yet to meet a single company which works like ERP
| are designed to work. This is their edge over competition,
| their reason for existence on brutal market. And ERP wipe
| that out, with the most expensive wiper you can imagine,
| while selling various bullshit left and right, and
| constantly lying to given company how everything is fine
| and under control.
|
| Truly, a way to kill a company. The fact that some survived
| it all to tell a story just shows how resilient whole such
| org is to such a massive stressor that ERP migration always
| is.
|
| They sell first and foremostly a lie - that you can have
| cover-it-all system just like competition, to match your
| unique way of working, without suffering tremendously, fit
| like a glove out-of-box (when reality is exactly opposite).
| It just never works, more like hammering a concrete glove
| on your progressively more disfigured hand, while being
| told how rosy your future will be.
| J_cst wrote:
| 6 years ago I was called as a contractor by the company I
| work for as they were desperate that their ERP was just a
| money drain and despite the money was not functioning at all.
| Fast forward 6 years. I'm a manager at that company,
| responsible for business processes and it systems. The ERP
| works great, everybody's happy. Secret recipe: dismantle
| custom company processes. Culture change: realize that
| company's not that special and don't need special ERP
| recipes. Takeaway: if the ERP standard is set up in a certain
| way, probably there's a very good reason underneath that
| setup.
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| Hershey? https://pemeco.com/a-case-study-on-hersheys-erp-
| implementati...
| client4 wrote:
| The nice thing about consulting at Hershey is that they have
| candy closets where you can grab what you like, it
| occasionally includes new demo candy. And the whole town
| smells like chocolate.
| mixedCase wrote:
| Damned. I'd be tempted to write down in my resume "Company
| would've saved N million dollars and 5 years of their time had
| they listened to me" were it not such a double edged sword.
| jmole wrote:
| No one gets credit for "I told you so" - look at it this way,
| you didn't have the skill at the time to make the company
| listen to you.
| joshuahutt wrote:
| How could you, in such a case?
| jmole wrote:
| I don't know, and maybe there was no solution. Just
| offering a different perspective.
| elwell wrote:
| short the stock
| nilamo wrote:
| They ignored the CTO on an issue that was 100% tech
| based. There was no winning, the board decided to ignore
| the person they hired to make that sort of decision for
| them.
| nick7376182 wrote:
| Better to write "managed critical scoping phase of $xx
| migration". Not your fault the company priorities later
| changed and it wasn't completed!
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Change this from ERP to POS and you've scripted 9/10ths of the
| pains for many quick service restaurant chains.
|
| Story time: people are dense as hell. This one idiot put in his
| personal SSN to open $XX/m a year POS account. This account
| currently manages just over a hundred locations, and this
| fool's TIN has just been raking in millions for a few years all
| because 'I needed to get us signed up!' And what's better!?
| They still can't get out of the wet paper bag, because
| otherwise "we'll someone might start selling candy or something
| unapproved" > we'll isn't that's what your franchise liaisons
| and agreements are for?! I'm just beside myself.
|
| I'm so hyped on this because this one 'immovable problem'
| prevents me from having API access to my locations accounts.
| Everything just hurts. /rant
| bombcar wrote:
| I swear the only way to get an ERP or POS change to work is
| to start a competitor using the new solution and wait for
| them to acquire you.
|
| And then live forever with two systems running side by side.
| invalidlogin wrote:
| Would you mind breaking down the situation in a little more
| detail? Not my field and I find your story interesting.
| cutemonster wrote:
| I also don't totally understand, what's a TIN for example
| (Taxpayer Identification Number?) and why is it making
| money? (Don't taxes go to the state?)
| curious_curios wrote:
| Yeah, it's the identifier the government uses to
| attribute income for, and hence calculate the resulting
| taxes.
|
| In this case it sounds like a midsize business is using
| some random guy's number, so the tax authorities are
| under the impression there's a guy pulling in millions
| personally, and a company with no income. Given that
| individuals and companies get taxed differently in many
| different jurisdictions concurrently this will be a mess
| to untangle.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Wow that's amazing, thanks for explaining
| justinclift wrote:
| Was SAP or IBM the external vendor? :)
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Story as old as time. It's a second system, they rarely work.
| The only hope is to come up with something small and exciting
| the a new generation moves too. Then you can build it to become
| the new thing.
|
| Trying to build a total second system is nearly impossible if
| it's big and old.
| callwhendone wrote:
| >I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been
| developed over about 15 years by various developers.
|
| I read this and immediately became sick to my stomach. I
| despise working in corporate america.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I despise working in corporate america.
|
| America might lead the way, but corporate anything, anywhere
| is pretty terrible.
| dxxth wrote:
| I bet it was Oracle, SAP, or IBM. The hydraheaded horror of
| enterprise bloated licenses.
|
| I feel this on a deep level since the ERP system at our company
| is in the middle of moving to one of these big vendors and so
| much is simply not working out, extending timelines and
| development cycles. Cost only goes up and ROI is pushed out
| beyond the horizon.
|
| PLM is equally bad and a horror show of legacy vendors trying
| to sell their solutions with the promise of customizability.
| Again the small, more modern players in the PLM space are
| constantly ignored for the big legacy ones and it turns out
| those legacy platforms even in their latest iterations are
| inflexible at best or downright hellish at worst. The reason
| behind all of this? Service contracts and vendor lock-in are
| the main drivers of value for these vendors, rather than
| quality (and modern) engineering.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| I'm sure it worked out well for the pocketbooks of the new
| management.
| some_guy_in_ca wrote:
| I've spent my entire 30 career in ERP Consulting (PeopleSoft),
| working with Payroll, Accounting, and Student management
| systems.
|
| I have a current client that is a mirror of this exactly. They
| had one new executive go to a sales demo, and the sales guy
| told him it would be "live" in a few months, and he believed
| it. It was so laughable and downright embarrassing for the
| client. In this case, I know it is at least a 3-year project if
| you have competent team members and vendors. It also depends on
| how you define "success" and how many business processes you
| are willing to break. However, these can stretch into 5 year
| projects when you are working with mission critical systems
| running accounting and payroll. In those cases, you cannot move
| fast and break things.
|
| Most organizations don't have competent teams, and the vendors
| are often made up of low-skilled offshore workers, which makes
| nuanced, complex projects very complicated. The sales side will
| promise the world then the implementation team is low skilled
| and underdelivers.
|
| I have seen this with several other clients, replacing pieces
| of PeopleSoft modules with different applications. Sometimes
| they come back and sometimes they just suffer through it and
| then find a third option after the new system fails to deliver.
|
| Most ERP systems are just CRUD systems. So, you end up with a
| working CRUD system being replaced by a new CRUD system. The
| old system had its strengths and weaknesses. The new system
| will solve some problems and break others.
|
| You spend 3-5 years replacing a system only to end up in the
| same place you were before: A CRUD system. This is maddening
| unless you are the new vendor and getting enriched.
| kgeist wrote:
| Wow, we had the exact same situation. We had a 15 year old
| CRM/ERP developed in-house, full of very specific and complex
| business processes/rules/entities tailored to how our business
| works. At some point, someone decided to migrate to Dynamics
| CRM. As it wasn't realistic to migrate immediately, they chose
| to do it incrementally: the both CRMs would be active at the
| same time, and there would be lots of data synchronizations
| between them, and our managers/the system's users would learn
| how to use Dynamics CRM in the meantime. The project was
| scrapped after 1 year because they realized that fully
| migrating it would took many years, and the managers didn't
| like the new CRM because it was lacking functionality (didn't
| match the existing workflows), and overall the whole
| synchronization stuff was pretty fragile and full of bugs. Now
| we've chosen the path of improving dev practices in the
| existing CRM to impove its reliability instead of hoping that
| somehow magically a new CRM would solve all our problems
| without any effort.
| 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...
| veb wrote:
| Totally sounds like Spark :D
| worik wrote:
| International.
|
| I heard Spark was worse, but this was not it.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Coming from academia, as I was more or less, this was a
| valuable lesson.
|
| Academia, where there is a reasonable budget but it's
| completely impossible to spend is as the cycle of meetings,
| emails and fucking around is eternal.
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| Only working 40 hours is different from only logging 40
| hours, this is the important part:
|
| > they would put pressure on their workers to work
| overtime but not log the hours.
|
| The email was to get in writing that his boss told him to
| lie about how many hours he worked.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It was obviously a joke you didn't get
| asdfman123 wrote:
| It's actually pretty unfortunate if they heard that, didn't
| get confirmation, and just stopped going to class.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yeah it's actually a little terrifying, almost a lack of
| survival instinct
| coryrc wrote:
| Not so concise, but I've done this (kinda). I did give a
| presentation to the class later in the semester about a
| practical implementation of things they worked on all
| semester though.
| 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.
| drekipus wrote:
| Stuff like this makes me angry. I had similar experiences
| in uni.
|
| I grew up very poor, so finishing uni was like, an
| achievement I had to do, but I learnt C++ and HL2 modding
| and other computer stuff back in highschool.
|
| My uni experience was 7 years of hell (multiple gap years
| to go do real work before coming back). Getting stuff like
| "pseudocode can't have an equal sign in it, so NC" on
| assignments.
|
| "Even if you finish all the assignments you must attend
| every tutorial or you pass"
|
| Ive told many academics to go to hell. I'm not paid to be
| there like they are.
|
| My grades go from "barely passed" to "high distinction"
| like a rollercoaster each year.
|
| - and yet, I still really wanted to like uni. I do still
| want to like it, it's just a shame about the academics
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| It's hard to say with this little information, but it
| sounds like you might have chosen the wrong school for your
| goals?
|
| The database class at my uni was mostly relational algebra.
| Likewise, many other classes were mostly foundational
| theory (though we did have project-based applicative
| classes too).
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| It was the closest reasonably priced state school near to
| my home thst took transfer credits from my community
| College. I should have gone for copywriting
|
| The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3 twice
| so I don't think they were unacademic
| rendall wrote:
| > _The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3
| twice so I don 't think they were unacademic_
|
| This failure also may be a sign that it was the wrong
| school. A course taught badly or indifferently can make a
| subject tedious or difficult, that when taught well is
| exciting and easy.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I loved my math prof, I just suck at math. I took him
| twice.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I took a database design class in college. I had been using
| MySQL for years at this point (by no means an expert, but
| databases weren't foreign to me).
|
| In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries
| right (don't get me started on programming/writing queries
| on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on
| each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn't put a
| semicolon at the end of my query. Something I had never
| done in any database tool, never done in my code, and only
| done 1-2 times on the CLI if that.
|
| IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places.
| Teaching things 10+ years out of date by people who have a
| chip on this shoulder towards anything new. I had an EE
| professor who literally did not go a single class without
| find some way to denigrate web developers and "not real
| developers". Fun times.
| sensanaty wrote:
| It's been a while since I've touched SQP, and most of my
| experience is with psql, but as far as I can recall if
| you type commands into the psql console without a
| semicolon the commands don't get executed properly?
|
| Still a dumb reason to deduct points though
| joshstrange wrote:
| You are correct, on the command line you need it but
| pretty much every GUI tool and language binding auto-add
| it for you. It felt very nit-picky and not at all based
| in reality. I got all the joins/limits/order/where/etc
| correct, the semicolon doesn't matter for what I felt the
| test should be actually testing on. Testing human's
| ability to memorize or write perfect syntax when they
| will never do that unaided in reality is just silly.
| flutas wrote:
| > IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most
| places.
|
| I hate to agree, but yeah.
|
| I'm watching my husband go through a CS degree course
| right now, and the stuff he talks about I'm just like
| "why are they focusing on this, you literally never use
| this."
|
| His "computer graphics" class was all about using the
| original GLUT library. The school specifically
| highlighted M1 Macs as good computers for their CS
| department students to use. Think about this combo for
| about 5s.
|
| Yeah, the lib wasn't available in arm format...
| darknavi wrote:
| One of my professors would mark us down for each line of
| code that is over 80 characters.
|
| What it really was was a forcing function to figure out
| auto formatting tools, so in the end I didn't mind.
| coldpie wrote:
| When I had BS classes that required attendance, I'd just
| sit reading a book. Teacher doesn't respect me, I don't
| respect them. Screw em.
|
| Completing university is the most useless project I've
| worked on.
| 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.
| theragra wrote:
| This is so painful. Kindle still after all these years cannot
| select a single word without a comma. So, dictionary does not
| work. Such simple thing could be fixed, but you did all this
| bullshit work instead.
| wging wrote:
| I've used a Kindle since 2012 and I don't think I have ever
| seen that kind of dictionary issue. On my Kindle, even though
| text highlighting behaves as you describe, dictionary lookups
| still work because punctuation is stripped before searching.
| For example I just highlighted "doing," (including the comma)
| and the dictionary shows the definition of the word "doing".
| I wonder if it works differently for languages other than
| English. (There is a different problem, that the
| stemming/trimming can be too aggressive and gets you
| irrelevant words in searches -- i.e. 'several' when you
| search 'severance'.)
| ornornor wrote:
| What got me was the kindle's inability to not have ragged
| edges on the right. It's really not that hard to implement
| I'd assume, LaTeX and the kobo do it well. Switched to kobo +
| calibre years ago, never looked back.
|
| Also, I try my best not to buy anything Amazon anymore
| because Bezos is a gigantic prick.
| duderific wrote:
| I always marvel at how bizarre it is that there's a permanent
| ad on the Kindle even when it's "off". The books they recommend
| are never pertinent to me in the slightest.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I feel like this exists so that people who use their kindle
| will pay trn bucks to turn it off.
| delecti wrote:
| It's possible things have changed, but at least while I
| still worked there, virtually nobody paid to turn the ads
| off. It was a vanishingly tiny number.
|
| Though fun fact, some execs did the math before making the
| smart cover, and figured they'd make more money from that,
| than they lost from people not being able to see and
| interact with ads.
| duderific wrote:
| I just ignore it, I don't know why anyone would pay to
| turn it off. It goes away as soon as you start reading
| the book.
| 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.
| rkagerer wrote:
| When I began reading this I thought it would end in people
| hooking kiosks full of cash to the back of their pickup trucks
| and screeching away.
| frederikb wrote:
| I've actually seen this in the wild this year. It was placed at
| a train station in a small town in southern Germany, which
| presumably did not have a physical bank branch. It was exactly
| as you said: basically a chair, keyboard and screen in a tiny
| building (not much larger than a phone booth).
| 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.
| rvba wrote:
| Sounds like recreating Doom. Or Linux.
| 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/
| all2 wrote:
| This is wonderful. It's almost like chatting with NPCs that the
| developers don't want you to talk to.
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's even more amusing to have something like that, it gets
| shelved in the archives, and five years later it somehow
| ended up being half rolled out because some bright eyed
| intern found it and thought it was procedure.
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| It's probably been leaked as well, maybe sitting in an
| unsecured S3 bucket for a while after one of those
| migrations.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| > they kept paying me so I kept showing up.
|
| What a line.
| tmountain wrote:
| If this was your main gig, congratulations on getting a big
| chunk of your life back to do whatever you wanted. I really
| enjoyed reading your story. It reminds me a little of "the
| story of Mac".
|
| https://wm-help.net/lib/b/book/2895812152/59
| warner25 wrote:
| > ...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...
|
| I love it. A co-worker of mine told a similar story. For at
| least six months, his only regular responsibility was to
| compile a report every week and email it to a distribution list
| for the headquarters one echelon above us. It wasn't a ton of
| work, but it was all manual and he was meticulous. He dutifully
| did this without any feedback until someone finally replied to
| simply say, "We do not require this report, and have never
| required it. You may choose to either continue or discontinue
| sending it."
| 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.
| zilti wrote:
| Well, this sounds like the opposite of overengineered, but
| definitely terrible
| 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.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Long term, work has to have value in aggregate, otherwise we
| end up toiling for nothing.
| 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.
| dambi0 wrote:
| I don't know the context and details of course. But might the
| introduction of various microservices have impacted the cost /
| complexity of the project?
| 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?
| QuercusMax wrote:
| Nope! They decided they didn't want to do that kind of work
| any more, so it's all been thrown away.
| 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!
| rossant wrote:
| Thank you.
| Froedlich wrote:
| Someone I knew was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to
| 20 years after taking his child to the ER. The doc there
| decided it was "shaken baby syndrome" and called the cops.
| After that, he was on the guilty-until-proven innocent track.
| The body was cremated with no second opinion.
|
| He still has three or four years to go. No parole here for
| "baby killers."
| rossant wrote:
| I am so sorry.
| bdzr wrote:
| The justice system is filled with all sorts of this stuff,
| sadly. Claiming they can match a shell to the gun it came out
| of, blood spatter, etc. My favorite example of this existing at
| a micro scale is when a professor claimed she could determine
| age, sex, and race from the footprint of a suspect.
|
| [1] https://greensboro.com/anthropologist-testified-
| nationwide-g...
| tgv wrote:
| Inform lawyers? They can cite this as credible doubt, or
| whatever the correct legal term is.
| rossant wrote:
| Yes, there are lawyers who have become experts on these cases
| and whose tireless work have helped hundreds of people. But
| that doesn't scale, there are tens of thousands of cases. The
| real solution will come when doctors fully update their
| knowledge, which may still take a decade or two.
| ornornor wrote:
| I'm one of these people who, until reading your comment,
| thought shaken baby syndrome really was a thing... Thanks for
| spreading the info!
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't think any of those details matter, that's still
| illegal and you could've gotten in trouble legally.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I'm curious; what law was being broken, exactly?
| epolanski wrote:
| Breaking fiduciary duty would be the first that comes to
| my mind.
|
| Previous user took a very huge risk. I've seen similar
| stuff happen, you can get sued (along whoever told you,
| but you need proof) just for the sake of making an
| example in front of the rest of the company.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| CEO can say it is his fiduciary duty to phase out old
| software and put a brand spanking new modern enterprise
| grade system.
|
| Also, still it is not illegal. Just that the shareholders
| need to sue him to matter at all.
| ikiris wrote:
| Where do you think fiduciary duty exists as a random
| software dev?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Fiduciary duty is a particular legal concept about the
| responsibility one party has to another, and only applies
| in specific, defined circumstances. A random developer
| doesn't have a fiduciary duty to anyone, and he wasn't
| taking any risk.
| sgentle wrote:
| Sibling commenters: for what it's worth, the notion of an
| employee having a fiduciary duty to their employer isn't
| as crazy as it sounds. eg, see here: https://www.lexology
| .com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1...
|
| That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to
| make that an employee following the instructions of their
| superior was breaching fiduciary duty. If they weren't
| acting to their employer's benefit, then whose? Employee
| fiduciary duty cases tend to be more about things like
| embezzling or competing with your own company while
| you're still working there.
|
| An example of Fox getting shut down for trying to claim
| that sexual harassment was a breach of fiduciary duty:
| https://www.barnespc.com/news-articles/limitations-on-
| the-sc...
| epolanski wrote:
| > That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to
| make that an employee following the instructions of their
| superior was breaching fiduciary duty.
|
| There has to be proof about that. If everything was
| verbal how do you prove it?
|
| There's no way around the fact that sabotaging your
| company is illegal and a breach of contract.
| ikiris wrote:
| The leap you took from following your director's
| expectations to sunset a product to sabotaging your
| company is pretty epic.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thanks for the correction, TIL.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| What law was broken?
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| I don't see how it's any different than Windows ME.
| ajcp wrote:
| morality <> legality
| burnte wrote:
| What laws do you think making a bad tool violates?
| gosub100 wrote:
| but you can't seem to name which crime.
| bobnamob wrote:
| The operative word is "internal" in OPs post.
|
| Incentives and adoption goals for internal tools are weird at
| large corps. Intentional suckage is just another tool to
| drive migration
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Even if it were an external tool, I fail to understand how
| there would be a legal problem. Companies use all sorts of
| shenanigans to encourage users to migrate. Immoral? Sure,
| but software crossed that bridge a long time ago.
|
| Heaps of people online have stories about how Microsoft
| tricked them into upgrading Windows.
| 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.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Did you meet the coworkers who were complaining at the
| coffee brewer or sth like that, and overheard anything they
| said about it? If so, must have been an odd feeling, and
| hard to not smile and say something
| drpixie wrote:
| Different but similar. I once wrote a trivial lotto number
| selector app, at the request of some colleagues. It just
| emitted a few unique random numbers. Silly but why not.
|
| They hated it.
|
| I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number.
| They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)
| bombcar wrote:
| Reminds me of all the rules you have to apply to a random
| music player to make it feel random.
| yhager wrote:
| That's not a useless project! It's a silly piece of code, but
| it gave joy to people, so I would say much more useful than
| most stories in this thread.
|
| Back in the nineties my dad had the notion that if you make
| the computer select numbers at random many times, and you run
| statistics on the results you gain some "legitimacy" to these
| selections. So he asked me to write a "lotto number selector
| program", but it needed to run for a few hours and select
| many numbers and then output the ones that were selected the
| most or some such. Maybe it was more sophisticated, but I
| can't really remember the details. I guess I could just add a
| delay instead of actually selecting the numbers, but I
| wouldn't lie to my dad :)
|
| It was super silly, but like you said, why not, I was a
| teen/tween and I didn't mind playing around with silly
| software.
|
| He actually used it and actually filled out the lotto numbers
| based on it. No, we never won the millions :)
|
| Also - I just visited a casino in Spokane, WA for the first
| time ever. Isn't that what all the machines there are doing?
| A random number emitter thingy with random delays, animation,
| music and flashing lights?
| Cloudef wrote:
| Your dad's thinking wasn't wrong, but you should've used
| the same PRNG as the machine that generates the official
| lotto numbers. Of course you still probably won't win
| though :P
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Of course you still probably won 't win though_
|
| This is the sort of attitude that ensures you don't win!
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| This is the same psychology in play when the lotto balls pop
| from the hopper or loot boxes open or slot machine wheels
| turn. A few seconds of suspense and fanfare for the reward is
| more satisfying.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Rarely are people ever that honest to you in a corporate
| environment.
|
| Usually you have to spend years working away and trying to
| guess why everything you're told to do makes the software
| worse.
| rgmerk wrote:
| There may have been very good reasons to sunset the internal
| tool, and underhanded as this was it may have made a necessary
| process a lot less painful that it might otherwise have been.
| dkarl wrote:
| We had an internal tool that was written as a quick hack by a
| rogue developer but then became crucial for our operations. It
| was starting to show some rough edges and some performance
| limitations, so a big project was planned to replace it, run by
| two fancy new hires who demanded teams of underling developers
| and ridiculously inflated titles before they would tackle the
| project. It quickly became clear that this project would not
| bear fruit anytime soon, so my boss asked me on the down-low to
| produce an unofficial stopgap replacement for the parts of the
| old system that weren't scaling well. However, it could never
| threaten to be a full replacement, because then I'd be stepping
| on the toes of our expensive diva hires.
|
| Long story short, last time I heard, both the original hack and
| my partial replacement were still in use ten years after I
| left. The big project ran for almost two years without
| replicating a single feature of the original hack. Right up to
| the last, the fancy guys produced an impressive series of
| complaints and excuses that basically said that they were doing
| everything right but doing things right didn't work because the
| problem and the context were wrong.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| I don't understand why anybody would commit to work that
| explicitly and deliberately makes other people's lives
| miserable.
|
| Where do you draw the line?
| brightball wrote:
| It was my first job. In that position I pretty much did
| whatever I was asked without questioning it.
|
| Did a lot of great work with good people there too. Projects
| that lasted for nearly a decade.
| 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?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Not really. It wasn't the kind of software that could make
| money. Probably a big reason that this kind of software never
| improved, over all these years.
|
| It might have been the best of the stuff no one wants to pay
| for.
| zilti wrote:
| And you really leave us hanging here with so little information
| bombcar wrote:
| They had developed a way to punch people in the face over
| TCP/IP.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sadly, I really can't be more specific than that. Much as I
| disagreed with their decision, it was theirs to make, and I
| respected it.
|
| It probably would not have been a money-maker (which was a
| big reason for the cancellation), and it cost a _lot_ to
| make. Those top people don't come cheap.
|
| I am not doing the same kind of thing, these days, but I have
| yet to see any software, from anyone, to this day, that can
| do what it did. I know that the interaction people requested
| a final copy of it, for themselves, as they had done so much
| work on it, and loved the result so much. It was basically at
| beta quality, when the project was killed.
|
| It's not a total loss, though. That project was probably the
| best learning experience of my career.
| laeri wrote:
| Not sure what is hindering you talking about it. You seem
| to be proud of it.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Um ... confidentiality? Maybe it's become _passe_ , these
| days, but I subscribe to it.
|
| I talk my life and experience. I'm old, and have been at
| this game for a while, so I've seen a fair bit. I don't
| fluff, brag, or humblebrag. I don't pretend to be what
| I'm not, and I can back up what I say. Sometimes, I don't
| think it's necessary or proper to do so (like in this
| case), and what I claimed was not so outrageous, when you
| consider that the graphic design agency was Pentagram,
| and the Interaction design agency was DDO. They did most
| of the difficult work, and did a great job of it.
|
| Assume whatever you want as my motivation. I don't
| particularly care. It's a free country.
|
| You seem to know me, better than I know myself, and I
| guess you're ... um ... _proud_ of that?
| epolanski wrote:
| Quite impressed by your depth and experience in the sector.
|
| You making such a bold statement makes me even more curious.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm not so impressed by it. I routinely worked with folks
| that made me look like a piker.
|
| Curiosity is the spice of life. Enjoy!
| 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.
| XCSme wrote:
| The "cloud" is just overpriced VPSs....
| namaria wrote:
| Yeah I mean you just described the whole business model.
| mikigraf wrote:
| Sounds like a company that later migrated to Google Cloud
| 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.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Why watch office when life same.
| tukajo wrote:
| This is the funniest thing I think I've read all day.
|
| Thank you.
| morkalork wrote:
| I have a terrible urge to build an automated version of this
| with computer vision and give it the name "EnGuAgEmEnT MeTeR"
| elwell wrote:
| put it on the blockchain
| hestefisk wrote:
| And AI-enable it.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Pieces of FlairCoin
| baw-bag wrote:
| Oh my god, it isn't the same product but I was the user of a
| similar thing at an old job I had for 2 years only it was a
| slider from 1-10. I always chose 1 no matter how productive,
| happy or driven I felt. I remember that HR called me in because
| of this and in a round-about way said I can't just keep doing
| that as it was bringing the whole purpose of the system down.
| If I didn't want to interact with the system then I should just
| select a higher value and a few months later, my manager said
| that I didn't need to use that system any more.
|
| The funny thing is that in my current job, they use something
| called "Dailybot" or something integrated to google chat where
| you check-in and once a week, give an emoji between 1-5 about
| my productivity or something... Unhappy face for me.
|
| What value is this supposed to provide? If you take part, it
| will be 8-9-10 regardless to "look good" and if you don't take
| part like me, it drags the entire team to an average of 4-5-6
| which is the same as not having the system at all and yields
| the real outcome of average.
| bombcar wrote:
| The job is to provide 8-9-10 to put on spreadsheets and
| PowerPoints somewhere.
|
| In other word pointless. The only time you can even
| halfheartedly trust the results is when the peoples surveyed
| are almost adversarial- like customers.
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| This is what happens when you invite HR to an OKR meeting.
| preommr wrote:
| Probably unpopular opinion: Silly excercises like this are a
| good way to see who bends the knee and who is a maverick, and
| projects only work when most people are docile enough to go
| with the flow and follow orders. Identifying people that make
| waves and evaluating if they're worth the hassle is an
| important part of running a successful business.
|
| This is often sad and depressing, but sometimes it's just
| about doing your job, and getting some good food after work
| to counterbalance the bullshit.
| ok_dad wrote:
| You are probably correct but I hate what you wrote. I hate
| that humans are treated this way by businesses in order to
| eke out a few more measly percent profit.
| samus wrote:
| Sadly, this way a company also gets rid of people who can
| speak uncomfortable truths when the need arises. Long-term
| only the desperate and the spittle lickers persist.
|
| If management is unable to deal with people that rock the
| boat (as in firing should there be actual problems) then
| they seriously lack backbone and leadership qualities since
| spouting corporate propaganda and playing silly conformance
| games with employees is probably all they can do.
| mberning wrote:
| A couple of the places I have worked at they would hire an
| outside firm to conduct these type of surveys and they would
| anonymize the feedback. I saw the reports provided to some of
| the managers and the feedback in certain areas was clearly
| unvarnished. Now whether it lead to any meaningful change,
| that's hard to quantify. I guess if you did them multiple
| times per year for several years you could start to establish
| a trend.
| rendall wrote:
| I once worked for a consultancy that had something similar,
| and tied those satisfaction metrics to quarterly bonuses, so
| they were guaranteed to be inflated.
| danielscrubs wrote:
| My boss said everything bellow 9 is a failure with a hard
| look. Our metrics happiness level rose to 9 the very next
| day. Boss got promoted because he was creating such happy
| teams. Sometimes I wish I didn't live in a Dilbert strip.
| jknutson wrote:
| I laughed out loud in my office reading the dilbert strip
| line. Thanks for the giggle, that's a new one for me lol
| thefourthchime wrote:
| This is a joke right?
| valicord wrote:
| Is "guage" some sort of joke that I don't get or just a
| misspelling?
| mkl wrote:
| It's a misspelling of "gauge", judging by "on a car dashboard
| style guage". Was pretty confused up to that point.
| jknutson wrote:
| Maybe it's some sort of in joke for the company. At least,
| that's how I took it-- alongside it being an obvious
| reference to a speedometer. My intuition was that maybe the
| company's name was "gauge", or better yet the CEO's name
| was gauge. I really hope it was the latter. Makes me think
| of Hooli from Silicon Valley for some reason lol
| livinglist wrote:
| For me, more money == more motivation, nothing else
| replwoacause wrote:
| The more experience I get working in corporate environments the
| more I hate the letters CEO and HR. Truly some of the wackest
| people in these positions.
| 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.
| tomdell wrote:
| You're right! The company is very openly continuing layoffs
| for the next 2 years, so I don't have much faith in the team
| I was moved to sticking around for much longer. I fixed up my
| resume and started applying elsewhere the week after everyone
| I work with was laid off. The job search is going well,
| fortunately.
| drekipus wrote:
| Prototypes mean nothing.
|
| I've tried to explain prototypes, draft/paper versions. People
| just nod and wonder why they can't use it yet. They live in
| their bubble and you live in yours
|
| To be honest if you made 10 prototypes it just looks like you
| can't finish anything. Not that you're a genius problem solver.
|
| Make something that barely works and then hand it over to them
| and don't look back. Ship it.
| bombcar wrote:
| The only prototypes are extremely personal. Once you show it
| to anyone else, it's production.
| 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.
| sirspacey wrote:
| I'm curious what you've found helps you achieve that?
| 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.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I feel much the same way about working on code for Australia's
| Consumer Data Right (CDR).
|
| Mostly it would have been OK if the code handed to me (a
| project I took over) wasn't the worst kind of "smart people
| doing stupid things" dependency injection hell in javascript.
| Then, having to deal with the ever evolving CDR regulations for
| the banking sector and trying to get the institution I was
| working for to take it seriously (there are fines involved if
| it doesn't work).
|
| The end result - nobody in the public actually uses it except
| for a few dodgy lender-of-last-resort companies.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| My first contractor gig was to add some functionality to a
| document processing script.
|
| First time I was programming in the scripting language, but after
| reading the docs to grok the syntax and standard library apis and
| a repl to test out code snippets, I was good to go.
|
| I open the script.
|
| If you've ever transferred a CRLF-delimited text file to a UNIX-
| like OS and back, you know what I saw.
|
| The script alternated between code and blank lines. Someone had
| committed the code after some tool somewhere along the way did a
| CRLF->LFLF->CRLFCRLF roundtrip.
|
| And no one decided to bite the bullet and cleanup the mess.
|
| Sigh.
|
| After spending a couple of days to get the script running on test
| documents and understanding the code flow, I discovered two
| things:
|
| 1 - a coder had inserted a one minute sleep() call delay into the
| script (so the script's output could be checked?) That coder
| committed the change which was rolled out into production!
|
| 2 - the script had two large if statements, each several hundreds
| of lines long. There were a handful of differences in the two if
| statements - took me at least half a day to confirm that there
| were only a handful of trivial differences.
|
| I removed the sleep call and refactored the two if statements
| into two function calls with the few variable arguments required
| and created one function to handle the functionality of those two
| large if statements.
|
| I also removed all the extraneous blank lines.
|
| In the end:
|
| - reduced the script's line count by 75% (half the lines were
| blank, consolidated the two large if statements into one function
| and invoked the function 2x)
|
| - reduced the runtime by one minute per document processed
|
| The company didn't believe me when I mentioned the sleep() call
| in the script. I had to open the script on the production box and
| show them the sleep() call.
|
| I committed my refactored script and got assigned to another
| project.
|
| One year later, I ask how the new script was doing in production.
|
| The people responsible for the daily monitoring of the document
| processing say that they're still using the old script.
|
| Oh.
|
| That's nice.
|
| I hope they took out the one minute sleep() call at least.
| ewrong wrote:
| Roughly 15 years ago I worked for a large media company that was
| thinking about moving into the smart energy meter business.
|
| I was late to join the team, but when I did, they'd already
| bought and branded thousands of meters that were boxed and ready
| to go in a nearby warehouse. The team had already built a number
| of APIs exposing controls for these meters as well as various
| monitoring and reporting interfaces. A UI already existed but it
| had issues, my job was to come in and fix that and get us ready
| for release.
|
| We worked hard for a couple of months and whipped this thing into
| shape. Meanwhile a multi million budget was lined up for the
| marketing launch. Adverts where drafted, installation technicians
| where trained and merchandising was branded. All systems go.
|
| It all drove towards a set in stone deadline and we busted our
| guts to get there... When the day arrived, there we sat. Ready.
| All features built, no bugs that we knew of. Ready to hit the 'go
| live' button. Honestly in 30 years working in the industry, that
| was the only time I think I've ever been in that situation.
|
| Our product owner walks into the room and says, "erm, there's a
| couple of issues we need to discuss at board level. Hold tight
| guys I'll be back".
|
| So we sit...
|
| Two days later he returns, "erm, guys... the board aren't sure
| that this product is on brand. And they are concerned that if it
| fails it could be bad for reputation. So, we're not launching."
|
| So we sat... for a month... working down our contracts whilst I
| taught myself Node.js
| bombcar wrote:
| Once I came to peace with realizing my job is to enable higher
| ups to do their job a lot of this came into perspective. Still
| a complete waste, but something somewhere was enabled.
| bo1024 wrote:
| > my job is to enable higher ups to do their job
|
| Ouch, I like to think it's the other way around.
| caseyy wrote:
| A lot of executives have ego problems where they're very
| vulnerable to not having their status reaffirmed. Others
| understand that everyone in a team has an important
| function in the whole of the business, that executives'
| function is specific but not more important, and they treat
| each other as equals. We could call it being ego-driven vs
| mission-driven.
|
| Most executives in big tech are firmly in the ego-driven
| camp and get high on their own supply of hot air. And they
| really believe that everyone's function in the company is
| to serve them.
|
| Notably, there are some leaders who are very mission-driven
| and see their people as peers. Usually they are quite known
| for it, as it's rare.
| yard2010 wrote:
| It's not a waste if you end up being paid. Not yours, amyway
| wruza wrote:
| I was churning out prototypes, tools and complete in-house
| solutions for years. Worked as a main tech guy in a "fast-moving"
| company with ideas mostly related to let's say less lit parts of
| the economy and strange tech involved. Having 4-6 projects per
| year that "we" could bury in few weeks for non-technical reasons
| was a norm. Sometimes I spent weekends to create something mvp
| very fast "to test the idea", which then was left dormant for
| another week and/or abandoned due to new findings.
|
| This was demotivating af. I wished I could go back 10-15 years
| into my consulting days when I helped real people to do
| understandable, healthy things.
| instagib wrote:
| I troubleshot, fixed, and learned a bit of a new spoken language
| for a project that was definitely being shut down over 6 months
| and the equipment destroyed.
|
| The new project would take over once it passed acceptance testing
| but the bugs of the old system were a daily annoyance to
| everyone. All of the knowledge learned does not apply to modern
| tech at all. I wasn't even directed to do it.
| abhgh wrote:
| Variable Discovery.
|
| Yes that isn't a thing; its a term I came up with, and I
| sincerely hope no one ever has to encounter such a situation.
|
| So, someone wrote a complex data processing pipeline, that read
| from some tables in a DB, processed the data in small and large
| ways, finally producing a bunch of variables that were passed
| into a downstream ML model. No documentation was produced, and
| the developer had exited the company.
|
| The problem: because of some high stakes issues with said
| pipeline's results, we needed to (quickly) find out which final
| variables were drawing information from which initial DB fields.
| And all we had were a bunch of scattered scripts (Python and Pig
| I think).
|
| For me that translated to this task: read the scripts to trace a
| path of successive variable definitions in terms of other
| variables, eventually connecting each output variable to one or
| more input column name. It took me 2 long days to trace these
| paths by manually reading the scripts. The evening sessions were
| particularly mind-numbing, and involved a few glasses of wine.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Did any of you work on DVB-H or Qualcomm MediaFLO? There are
| thousands of us out there.
|
| An entire ecosystem, killed overnight by the iPhone.
| meter wrote:
| I used to work for a defense contractor.
|
| There was a 3 month period where I had nothing to do.
|
| I was supposed write firmware for a piece of hardware, but the
| hardware was broken and wouldn't even turn on. I was told to wait
| for the electrical engineers to fix it.
|
| I sat in the lab all day, for 8 hours a day, with no internet
| access (it was forbidden), pretending to write firmware that I
| couldn't test, with no direction on what I should be doing. There
| was no simulator, no tests, no guidance.
|
| In that time, I would practice my own Leetcode problems in
| preparation for other jobs. All day long.
|
| About two weeks before I left the company, I received my security
| clearance. That's when I realized... they were just killing time
| until I had my clearance.
|
| All of a sudden, the flood gates were opened, and I learned about
| a really interesting project. Not interesting enough to keep me
| though ;)
|
| Six years later, I've 3x'd my compensation. And I love my job now
| (web development).
| Cyberdog wrote:
| As a web developer of 17 years, I'm dumbstruck at the idea that
| you're making three times as much doing this as you did at a
| damned defense contractor. They must have been totally chumping
| you.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| If you're a skilled webdev at FANG, ~250k+ is trivial.
|
| Lots of defense contractors will try and pay their fresh meat
| 80k so they can make more money. Government gets really
| touchy about hourly rates per person, but has no problem with
| 'fair' hourly rates for many more people to do the job one
| person could and should do.
| jajko wrote:
| I've increased my income roughly over 20x over past 20 years,
| its not impossible. Still doing same 100% employed java dev
| role as on Day 1. I've moved employers and countries few
| times, did some consulting too, purpose wasn't the money per
| se but when choosing your next employer salary is a good
| general indicator of how well you will be treated.
|
| Started really low since I knew I wanted the job and it would
| be temporary, didn't have any students loans (Europe baby!),
| and eventually ended up in position that pays better than 99%
| of software devs in Europe. Not most rewarding work, but its
| just work for me, life that matter happens for me when I log
| out.
| Froedlich wrote:
| > Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the
| project was given the go ahead by the directors after several
| meetings with a vendor -- Been there, got the T-shirt. Had the
| "sysadmin" job title and everything. And then the Board of
| Directors announced they had bought a complete data backup
| "solution", and I was to implement it forthwith.
|
| Had anyone bothered to ask me, I could have told them that their
| "solution", being a Windows-based software package, wouldn't run
| on their database servers, which ran SCO Unix. Which was quite
| adequately backed up with tar and cpio, and rotating off-site
| tape storage.
|
| Later, the desktop support group was surprised by the delivery of
| a couple of pallets of Compaq laptops and desktops with Windows
| 3. This was before "internet" was really a thing. The desktop
| guys set them all up, made sure they could log in to the Novell
| servers, and went home. However, the main application the clerks
| used was on the SCO boxes, which were accessed with NCSA Telnet.
| The Compaq machines had Ethernet ports, but their customized
| Compaq Windows version didn't have TCP/IP drivers, so the next
| morning they were frantically putting the old computers back so
| people could work.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Gotta love decisions from above without asking anyone doing the
| actual work with said tech/product.
|
| I worked at a company that bought 2 oracle servers (racks? Not
| sure, over $200K though, over 10 years ago now) because it was
| going to magically make everything better. We were on mysql at
| the time and there was a large effort to rewrite all our
| table/column names to work with oracle (there was some stupid
| length limit and maybe some characters weren't allowed). The
| project was abandoned and the exec who signed off on it had
| left to screw up some other company.
|
| It was many years before we were able to reverse the name
| changes (they made writing queries miserable and the names were
| confusing due to the abbreviations or lack of vowels) and more
| years still after that before we managed to turn those racks
| collecting dust into NAS storage for backups.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Ha, sounds like you've been working on this pointless thing for
| what, 4-6 weeks?
|
| When I worked for my country's defence organisation, I was the
| "primary development resource" on a project to rebuild the login
| page for their online services portal. I was allocated to this
| task full time for 14 months. I got some designs from the UI
| people, did a real shit job of turning it into a functioning page
| in angular in about a month (I'm not a frontend dev, they never
| asked me if I even knew what angular was, the job just landed on
| my desk one day), copied some npm magic to make it all render out
| to a single HTML file that could be installed in their fancy
| super security authentication system. For the remaining time I
| just attended a few hours of meetings a week and answered a
| handful of emails each week, maybe 2-3hrs of work a week, while a
| bunch of shit went on in the background to approve and document
| the work (stuff I didn't have the right title to do).
|
| I left that job three years ago, the login page for the online
| portal is still the one that was built in 2003.
|
| I'm fairly sure the entire point of the massive overallocation
| was for $CORP I was employed by to extract more money from $GOV,
| at the cost of a fraction of that paying my salary.
| snapetom wrote:
| I work in an industry full of "good old boy" corruption.
|
| A couple of years ago, our sister company asked us to support
| them (aka do the work for them) in an ML project with a vendor.
| We researched several in the industry and presented our choices.
| They rejected all of them and selected this fairly unknown one.
| This vendor was chosen without seeing a demo or interviewing
| alleged customers.
|
| Immediately, this vendor set off red flags, but our CEO was too
| chicken shit to push back. (No, I know what you're thinking. Our
| CEO wasn't in on it. He's too chicken shit and stupid.) I naively
| came into the company around this time and immediately set up
| discussions to explain our data and its sources. They didn't
| care. They just wanted the data. They threw fits when we brought
| up that we weren't comfortable with releasing financial and
| confidential data. They were up in arms about security
| requirements. We had to fly out to their headquarters for a demo,
| and they only offered to show us a canned demo. They kept blaming
| my company at every opportunity including to the point of
| switching out meeting notes and documents for signature.
|
| The running theory is that they were out of money, and were
| desperate for an exit strategy. They needed us to show off to
| potential buyers and investors. My theory was that they were only
| in it to sue us and get a settlement. And of course, decision
| makers at the sister company were in on the scam.
|
| Finally, our parent company finally started seeing through the
| scam, but we still had to cover our asses and meet certain
| deliverables. I created an epic that basically was sending data
| through Kafka to the vendor. And of course, they wanted it
| yesterday.
|
| I told the team, "This is all bullshit. They [the vendor] do not
| have the expertise to examine the data. They're not even going to
| look at it. Your work is going to be thrown away when this
| finally gets shut down. We just need to pipe data there. I don't
| care how messed up and dirty it is, don't bother testing."
|
| Sure enough, a little while later, the parent company shut down
| the project. I gleefully killed the pipe when word came down. The
| kicker was that the vendor wasn't officially notified for another
| month.
|
| During this time, did they ask us why the pipe was killed? Of
| course not.
| winter-day wrote:
| The current CTO of a publicly traded company had my entire
| engineering team rewrite an <anonymized internal tool>. Mind you,
| the current generation of the <anonymized internal tool> is
| completely fine, and in fact a massive improvement from our 1st
| and 2nd gen version. About a year into that completely useless
| project, the CTO lays off 2/3 of the team (including the original
| authors), reorgs another team into our team, and the latest gen
| <anonymized internal tool> is a complete pile of trash. I left
| the team a few months ago when I realized it wasn't worth the
| head ache of dealing with the terrible CTO, the literal human
| centipede which is the leadership chain, and the sales bro turned
| product manager.
| ekzy wrote:
| I made an app some years ago that let you order custom song books
| with chords (physical books), to play the guitar / sing along at
| campfires etc. I integrated the app with Spotify, a printing API,
| stripe, and ordered a few books for myself (basically you could
| import some Spotify playlists or just add some songs), compile it
| into a book and then place your order and get it delivered at
| home... all automated. I thought I could turn this into a nice
| SaaS, until I was told this is illegal as the lyrics and
| tabs/chords are protected by copyright. I couldn't find more
| motivation after this major roadblock so I gave up. It's still up
| and running, but only I have access to the printing feature. The
| name which I thought was clever was actually kinda confusing to
| people (lyrink.com as in lyrics + ink) and always autocorrected
| to "lyrics". I worked on this printing feature for many months.
| There's some really interesting programming challenges with
| trying to fit dynamic content from the internet, with chords and
| lyrics (where the chords have to be placed correctly near the
| lyrics) etc. into a nicely formatted physical book (without using
| a monospaced font)
| bombcar wrote:
| If you made it free and have it spit out a pdf that nefarious
| users could realize could be bound easily ...
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Well... yes, of course those things are copyrighted. I'm a bit
| surprised you didn't foresee that issue.
|
| But still, it sounds like you learned a lot about Stripe and
| that other API. Those are good skills to have. If nothing else
| you've padded your resume quite strongly, so the project wasn't
| entirely for nothing.
| llmblockchain wrote:
| Pretty much everything I have ever worked on.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| My first job was working on an open source bug tracking tool that
| had been overextended to hell to perform business tasks: kick off
| automated processes, read and write from the corporate data
| store, etc.
|
| I spent years fiddling with that thing. When the layoffs came and
| I left, they just threw the whole thing in the trash. Completely
| useless work.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| I once spent six months working the hardest I've ever worked in
| my entire life with a mechanical engineer, two technicians, a
| machinist, and all of the supporting cast of procurement and
| scheduling to build a test fixture for a control board for a
| satellite.
|
| There were four control boards per panel and four panels per
| satellite and a projected order of 12 satellites so were going to
| have over 200 boards (enough plus spares) to test and last go-
| around it took two days to test a single board with failures due
| to connector issues and I wanted to get that down to two boards
| per day and no failures.
|
| It was my masterpiece. Place a board on the fixture, pull down an
| assembly, and six micro-D, two nano-D, MCU and FPGA programming
| connections, remote thermal and multimeter probes, and a canbus
| connection with onboard amplifier to traverse the absurdly long
| cable all slotted with perfect precision into the board and were
| routed back to a test rack via a single cable bundle. Automated
| test bench scripts powered on the board, took voltage
| measurements, programmed the devices, and ran a suite of tests
| automatically and then printed out a report with a signature
| block for me to sign at the end.
|
| The board experienced no stress, every connector was mated with
| perfect force at the perfect angles, and it would cut down the
| amount of time needed to test the hundreds of boards we were
| going to build by months.
|
| It was featured in marketing materials for my employer.
|
| We built four of them and with all of the labor they probably
| cost a quarter million each but would put the program back on
| track as it was delayed.
|
| Additional delays in another part of the program led to the
| government cancelling the entire thing and we turned over all of
| our tooling and prototypes to the customer who probably put my
| fixtures in a warehouse for fifteen years before selling them for
| scrap value.
| al_borland wrote:
| You just described the last 3 years of my life, but instead of
| one pipeline, it's about 20 (of various sizes)... also,
| completely rewrite the old one so it keeps working, while at the
| same time writing the new one, which will take over and make the
| old one obsolete the second it's released to production... maybe
| even before.
|
| No one is actually doing any planning or looking to see if
| certain work is worth it. Just do all the things, do them all at
| once, because we can't be bothered to pause for an hour to ask if
| the juice is worth the squeeze.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The CIO demanded that we deploy Confluence for some special
| project. It had to be implemented with our external identity
| system for reasons.
|
| It was flagged as a "CIO Priority", so exempt from normal
| lifecycle activities and rules.
|
| I did this work in _2009_. I got a call a few weeks ago about it
| because it wouldn't restart. Turns out in 15 years it was
| migrated a dozen times, and most recently migrated to GCP.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I kid you not but it was a micrcoservice that added two numbers!
| This micrcoservice existed because management didn't want to
| clobber "specific business" logic in the formula of the addition,
| i.e., they don't want this service to own the arithmetic of
| calculating the two operands. We ended up having this service
| calling other 2 new created services to get the 2 operands then
| add them up and return. That's all. I remember the internal and
| cross-org discussions lasted a few weeks with several staff
| engineers of those orgs involved. Even sometimes, VPs of the orgs
| would show up to listen. The discussions were mostly about
| whether those 2 new services should computer the 2 operands or
| call yet another service! We have a few document reviews, design
| reviews and roll out plan.
|
| I was pretty bored to dead but it was some sort a promote project
| for a few people including myself. I couldn't stand it at some
| point and ask my skip manager to help. My skip pulled me out and
| said that I didn't have to spend time in this shit show. But it
| did hurt my promotion case for what it's worth.
| findingMeaning wrote:
| My whole life has been like this and I haven't started a career
| yet. Useless projects, one after another.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The government uses a medical coding system from a certain
| company. Not many others use this system however, and the
| government wanted the system to become more popular so they gave
| my company a 5 million dollar contract to add some features to
| enable collaboration and start building a community around the
| system.
|
| We implemented the contract faithfully, and checked all the
| boxes, but nobody outside the government wanted to use the
| system.
|
| We had a namespace of sorts we would allocate to the users in the
| community. There were a few times we wanted to make backward
| incompatible changes, which we were hesitant to do for good
| reason, but then I would go and check which parts of the
| namespace we had allocated and see that literally _nobody_ had
| used the system yet, so we went ahead and made the backwards
| incompatible changes.
|
| I left part way though the project. I don't know if they ever got
| any real users, but they did get the government's money, and, in
| fairness, did an honest job following the contract, so I can't
| blame the company.
|
| It was one of my first jobs and it bothered me a lot how weird
| things were following a contract rather than doing what actual
| users wanted. At the time I imagined how great things would be
| having real users I could deliver value to, but have since
| learned users aren't always as wonderful as I imagined.
| int_19h wrote:
| Once upon a time I worked at a moderately-sized (a couple hundred
| people) software company that was essentially run by a group of
| buddies who were its original founders, all in various technical
| roles. One of those guys had... very strong opinions about how
| software should be written. To sum it up, everything is done
| wrongly, and if it would only be done right - i.e. the way he
| envisioned - software would be much better.
|
| Now the company, up until then, was writing everything in C++
| (this is mid-00s, and they are doing low-level stuff to boot, so
| it kinda made sense). However they had trouble finding enough
| qualified C++ devs. This meshed with some of his ideas of using
| higher-level approach to parts of the product so that "idiots"
| (his words) could work on it, while "smart guys" could tackle the
| low-level issues. He managed to sell it to the rest of the group
| and to their funding sources, and appointed himself "chief
| architect".
|
| The logical thing at that point would be to take something like
| say Java or .NET. But, you see, they were also designed "wrong".
| So, instead, we would write our own thing, that would be even
| higher-level, but done "right". I believe something like a
| quarter of the company was eventually involved in this effort,
| and he insisted on the rest using the bits this team produced
| basically as soon as something worked (even if things would break
| all the time), so product development also ground down nearly to
| a halt.
|
| I was one of the people working on this boondoggle, although I
| came in at the middle of it, when it was already kinda sorta
| working... so long as you didn't look at it wrong. The whole
| thing was pretty much crutches and duck tape from the bottom up.
| At the bottom layer it was COM-esque framework for C++ that gave
| you things like garbage collection and reflection. On top of that
| sat the remoting layer, complete with its own protocol,
| proxies/stubs etc (COM, CORBA etc were all "wrong"). On top of
| _that_ we had a bespoke UI framework, with declarative markup
| written in XML and widgets bound to data models via its own
| custom high-level interpreted language that was inspired by XPath
| adapted to object graphs. On top of all this we had a bunch of
| libraries similar to .NET & Java stdlibs, to do stuff like
| filesystem access, SQL queries, and so on - some of it wrapping
| existing C++ libs, but most written from scratch.
|
| The guy insisted that once we had it all polished, productivity
| and quality of software produced by the company would skyrocket.
| In practice, the engineers working on all this were overwhelmed
| by the requirements, and most of us had no experience doing
| anything like that, so we learned as we went, with some amusing
| results. For example, codegen for interface definitions (also
| written in yet another bespoke language, because of course IDL
| was "wrong") was done by having a parser emit XML which would
| then be processed by gnarly XSLT (and, later, XQuery)
| stylesheets. The garbage collector used cycle detection on top of
| refcounting, but the former was so slow that releasing an object
| graph of a few thousand objects took on the order of 10s. The UI
| framework guys were constantly fighting with layout engine. And
| so on, and so forth. Amazingly, the "chief architect" managed to
| keep this scam running for over 2 years before people writing
| money checks finally paid attention to all the grumbling from the
| engineers and started to investigate. When they did, it all
| unraveled very quickly, of course. But in the meantime, a major
| new release of the company's main product had to be abandoned
| after spending those 2 years writing it on top of that messy
| stack - both its stability and its performance were deemed
| unacceptable. The whole thing was just scrapped.
|
| From the company's perspective, it was certainly the most useless
| project anyone in it has ever worked on, and it cost a _lot_ in
| terms of money. On top of that, the company lost quite a few
| great engineers who were forced to work on this thing, or to use
| it in product development.
|
| Speaking for myself, though, I've learned a lot working on it.
| Most of it, in the end, was knowledge of the kind "why doesn't
| Java / .NET do it that way?", but even that can be useful, or at
| the very least, interesting. The money was good, too, especially
| for someone fresh out of college.
| system2 wrote:
| Our firm signed a contract with a makeup manufacturing company to
| build an e-commerce system (web/shipping/marketplaces
| integrated). They had no idea how to advertise or drive traffic.
| We built it in 4 months, then told them what needed to be done
| for marketing in a meeting.
|
| Instead of following basic instructions, the CEO and CFO came
| together and invited every known influencer in Los Angeles to a
| rooftop party in Hollywood. For this event, they spent over 1
| million dollars paying for the fancy hotel for a day,
| decorations, gifts, and unlimited alcohol. After the event, there
| was no money left for marketing. They shut down the site after 3
| months of not trying anything else.
| rdl wrote:
| Worse than useless -- net negative -- everything related to
| Iraq/Afghanistan. I didn't go over there because I thought it was
| a good idea (nation building in either place is dumb, and any
| conflict at all in Iraq was dumb), and while individual projects
| sometimes made things locally better (like, speeding up network
| connectivity on a specific base), it was overall a dumb project
| which made things worse because it was done. Got paid pretty
| well, met interesting people, learned a lot, did stuff I'd never
| have gotten a chance to do otherwise, but yeah, net-negative.
| Aloha wrote:
| We built the Taliban a whole lot of nice infrastructure. Maybe
| they'll be able to use it, probably not though.
| all2 wrote:
| The US funded the Taliban. And Al-queda. And the other major
| terrorist orgs. They're all US funded and trained.
| XCSme wrote:
| It's about the journey, not the destination.
|
| Many times I worked on implementing fixes/performance
| improvements, spent many hours finding very complex solutions,
| implementing them, debugging them, testing, improving, etc., only
| for them to become obsolete immediately after release just
| because browsers released a new version/API that was 2x better
| out of the box.
|
| It happens a lot in software development, and I got used to it. I
| know that everything I develop is ephemeral. It could be used for
| many years, only a few days or maybe never released.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| All the time.
|
| A former employer had a client who had us re-write the same
| project 5 times. We kept each project repo backed up, because we
| were able to re-use pieces when the next re-write rolled around.
| Eventually they scrapped the project. The client printed money
| and wiped their ass with it like it was nothing. A lot of stress
| went into it for nothing. The project itself was a horror story.
| Maybe someday I'll write a blog about it.
|
| Then there's the one where someone high up wouldn't pay ten grand
| for a license, so he paid a senior dev to recreate the same
| feature set. Took this dev over a year, so over $100k+ for a
| amateur (by comparison) offshoot that is maybe as reliable?
| Instead of just buying a license for 10 grand (I am shifting the
| amounts on purpose, it may have been higher ;).
|
| Then there was the project where they hired a ton of Jr devs
| except like four (30+ devs) and charged senior rates for all of
| them. They refused to hire actual seniors, questionable hiring
| practices all around. The front-end folks were doing hacks that
| give me nightmares, because they had to (proprietary front-end
| framework). When the app hit the app store I saw all the negative
| reviews for it and was not surprised.
|
| Then there was the project I was what I call full-stack developer
| plus. It involved a web front-end (I worked on the back-end, and
| the front-end) to a daemon (I worked on this as well) and a
| debian package, as well as some external APIs. It also involved
| mDNS / Avahi. The idea was we would install this package on a OS
| we customized, then we would know we could run tests on this OS.
| I touched every major piece of that project, and was holding the
| weight of the other two developers because one was a junior, the
| other was some weird data science guy who wrote some of the worst
| code we ever saw.
|
| Edit: I forgot one key piece, I also wrote shell scripts to
| automate installing and provisioning this OS on Virtual Box
| instances, which would also check the network for this VM to be
| online and then install my Debian package.
|
| It also had noVNC (a web based VNC client) so we could remotely
| see these systems with ease.
|
| We had this thing running like a train by the time I was at my
| peak with the project, and one QA guy said one thing wasn't
| working, and the manager said we'll stop using it until its
| fixed. That was the death of that project. I also kind of left
| the company after all the burn out of basically carrying too much
| weight. It was one of my worst projects I worked on because of
| all the weight in my shoulders, but it was also one of the most
| fascinating ones.
|
| Then there are more recent examples I dare not utter since it was
| within the last year at my former employer (I'm looking for work
| HN ;).
| frrlpp wrote:
| Mine are a contest
| bensilbermouse wrote:
| Pinterest
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I once made a microwave purely in software. It works and yet it
| doesn't.
|
| https://microwave.pointless.click/
| aidantomcy wrote:
| this: https://github.com/aidantomcy/fortune pretty useless
| because a better version already exists
| smcameron wrote:
| 20 something years ago I spent the better part of a year writing
| a 3rd party RAID controller driver for Project Monterey (IBM and
| SCO's ill-fated unix collab) only for the entire project to get
| canceled literally the day after I finally got the machine to
| successfully boot up off the storage controlled by my driver. I
| like to think I got to do all the fun parts of driver development
| unbothered by any of the boring, troublesome maintenance.
| dopheide wrote:
| Interesting. Around that time I was working at a place that was
| contracted to build and host binaries for zSeries/pSeries in
| support of IBM's Linux on the mainframe effort. We didn't
| actually use any of it. I think we were just there to make it
| look like there was 3rd party support, even though it was all
| funded by IBM.
| neonlights84 wrote:
| A few years back, I interviewed with a company that specialized
| in air filtration products for hospitals and medical facilities.
| The company had grown rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and
| was gearing up to expand their facilities.
|
| During my interview, I expressed skepticism in their long-term
| prospects -- I questioned whether the air filtration market would
| continue to grow in the post-COVID era... and they were very
| bullish about their outlook. Their argument was actually very
| convincing -- they were preparing to kick off development of a
| new product that was intended to address ongoing air filtration
| issues that were well known before COVID. Multiple American
| states were drafting legislation mandating the use of these
| products, so the market opportunity was immediate and growing.
|
| After rejecting their initial offer, they raised the offer and I
| hesitantly accepted.
|
| Shortly after joining, I set up a product data management system
| that worked really well, and the other engineers (even the grey-
| beard) quickly adopted it. I'm very proud of the work I did on
| that project, and it only took me 2 months to design and
| implement.
|
| The next project ate up 2 years of my life. I was tasked with
| designing a medical smoke evacuator. Medical smoke evacuators had
| been around for almost 20 years at that point - there were
| numerous patents that were about to expire, so we didn't have to
| reinvent the wheel.
|
| Our company founder had started his firm tinkering in a garage.
| He had no formal background in engineering or business
| management, and got lucky with the pandemic. As the company grew,
| he started spending ridiculous sums of money on a distributed
| sales and marketing team, many of whom he poached from
| competitors. On the engineering side, he converted multiple
| outside consultants into full-time employees.
|
| Despite the incredible talent flowing into the company, our
| founder had no respect for the opinions of his employees. He had
| to have final say in all decisions, and his judgments always
| changed at the most inopportune time.
|
| I built multiple functional prototypes of a benchtop smoke
| evacuator, each about the size of desktop computer. With some
| finishing touches, it could have been a hit. It worked really
| well.
|
| Our founder shitcanned it, deciding that we needed to design an
| upright wheeled smoke evacuator instead. This ballooned the size
| and cost of the product - it had to be stable while supporting an
| articulating intake hose. Additionally, it had to have a huge
| touchscreen display, to show various air quality measurements
| (that very few customers actually needed). Lastly, it had to use
| a particular quiet (but somewhat underpowered) fan motor that he
| had already been ordered in large quantities.
|
| At this point we only had 8 months left to develop a tradeshow-
| ready prototype. In the medical world, 2 years is not an uncommon
| development timeframe. So I worked my ass off.
|
| Despite numerous obstacles (especially in wrangling with vendors
| and our electrical/software team), I managed to get a beautiful
| prototype ready and delivered to the tradeshow. Nestled among our
| older products, my product was the star of our show!
|
| Post-tradeshow, I continued working on improving the design for
| production. I cranked out at least 60 drawings, got quotes from
| vendors, sent the quotes to our CFO for purchase approval. And
| waited. And waited. Weeks went by without action.
|
| Behind the scenes, our company was starving for cashflow... the
| medical market was in a crunch, as hospitals had overspent during
| the pandemic. My interview market speculations a couple years
| prior had come true. Several members of our sales and marketing
| team were let go, along with one of my engineering coworkers. To
| stem the tide, our executives decided to go through another round
| of funding with our original investors. It was during this
| funding round that I found myself waiting for purchase orders to
| be sent.
|
| Then we got our funding... in the worst way possible. The
| investing group got a majority share, and they moved immediately
| to push the founding CEO out (and who could blame them - the guy
| was a hack)! The consultants came in, hard questions got asked.
| And then a few days later my engineering VP told me that all NPD
| projects had been axed by the new CEO, including my smoke
| evacuator. My VP privately warned my team that we needed to start
| looking for... "other options".
|
| A week later, I got laid off along with a coworker and our
| engineering VP. Just a couple weeks before I got married.
| Luckily, I got multiple interviews lined up in short order and
| was only unemployed for a short time.
|
| So that was the most useless project I've ever worked on. Doomed
| from the start, despite my best efforts.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I once spent the first half of a job moving services off the
| private cloud into a public cloud, then the second half of my job
| moving the same things back to the private cloud, then my team
| was eliminated and i was laid off. I wasn't even that mad because
| overall the team's existence was a little silly in my opinion.
| Loved the guys i worked with though.
| tootie wrote:
| I spent a ridiculous amount of time and energy building out a
| retail technology exhibition space. Final spit and polish was
| like working through multiple weekends for 12+ hours a day. We
| opened like a month before covid. I don't think it accomplished
| anything besides stroking the CEOs ego and making for some really
| cool case studies.
| abcdefgunit wrote:
| Diablo 4
| plants wrote:
| I'll bite. I worked at a very large Fortune 500 company for a few
| years. Through some twist of fate, I ended up on an overfunded ML
| organization that was under no pressure to produce anything of
| business value. The executive in charge of this operation let
| this fly for about a year before they realized they weren't
| getting anything valuable out of it. They put pressure on the VP
| of the org to start producing business value or else.
|
| Fast forward another month or so and there are six hastily thrown
| together initiatives in which our organization is contracted to
| other organizations to "help them out". The team dynamics were
| atrocious - our team was met with skepticism as to why we were
| helping out (was the other team not doing their job well
| enough?), and people on our team were often clueless on the
| business subject matter that we were supposed to be consulting
| on.
|
| I was assigned to one of these initiatives, and upon digging into
| the business problem, our team realized that the feature
| importance was completely contained within a single categorical
| feature in the model. All other features in the model were
| comparable to uniformly randomly generated features. In the
| selfish interest of being able to claim that they "solved their
| problem with ML", it was clear that either the model developer or
| the team at large had obscured this fact.
|
| In an effort to save face, the VP kept us on the project, despite
| the poor relations and lack of useful features to improve the
| model. We didn't improve the model and eventually, the VP ended
| up being "pushed out". Last I checked, this VP is currently the
| CEO of a startup that recently raised a $100M seed round.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| Can I just say that this thread is Exhibit A for me as to why I
| bristle when people claim that we're all going to be replaced by
| ChatGPT? Sure software development will evolve and change just
| like any profession, but what we do is so bloody complex at times
| that I just don't believe we won't be _developing_ software
| (whatever that comes to mean) for decades to come.
| joelcollinsdc wrote:
| I worked on a year long project to rebuild our payments system
| only to learn the company had been undergoing talks and was
| acquired by a different payment system competitor. Even though
| the pending acquisition was going on for the last 6 months of the
| project nobody told us to stop working on this thing that the top
| level people knew would never be used.
| froderick wrote:
| I wrote a bespoke scheme interpreter, then a virtual machine, a
| bytecode serialization format and a fun standard library. All in
| C. Totally useless for real work, not unique in any way, but
| really fun and great for learning. Sometimes useless shit is the
| best.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| I love that kind of stuff!
|
| In college I wrote an assembler, interpreter, and simulator for
| an 8-bit chip, the 8048. Got a four-credit "A" :-D
|
| Later I read the C code for a Scheme interpreter -- Scheme 9 in
| Empty Space -- highly recommended! I bought the book.
| https://t3x.org/s9book/index.html
| mazone wrote:
| Worked 5 years as a contractor for a system made to be used for
| all of the healthcare in a country. Payed by tax payer money.
| Some serious money. I never understood what the system actually
| was supposed to do during those 5 years. Started as some custom
| authorization server for new healthcare laws and then ended up as
| some kind of desktop app that had a launcher to launch apps. No
| idea what the purpose really was and heard it got cancelled a
| couple of years after i left.
| bunabhucan wrote:
| Paid by the irish government to learn fortran 77 to upgrade a
| mainframe era storm drain program so that it could "compete" with
| the simplest demo that came with a COTS windows solution -
| because they couldn't sole source something. There were bugs in
| it older than me.
| quartesixte wrote:
| A few years back, I was assigned to a new team and had to run
| some analysis on a selection of hardware that kept failing
| quality checks. Was told this was of the utmost importance to the
| product and that a future production push hinged on solving this
| problem. I was given a week. The scope of work would entail at
| least one really late night into the project.
|
| On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a
| passing engineer from a different team stopped by my desk to
| chat. Saw my screen and said "neat Python code, what's it all
| for?"
|
| I replied, "oh it's to do some number crunching on that quality
| problem."
|
| To which he blandly goes: "Oh. Didn't you hear? We scrapped that
| entire product line 3 weeks ago."
|
| Reader, I almost actually threw my keyboard off the desk.
|
| (If there was ever an argument for in-office work, it's coworkers
| telling you to STOP working on something and rescuing you from
| situations like this...)
| riizade wrote:
| As a very junior developer, I once worked on a chatbot for
| purchasing flight tickets. You know the ones, the annoying
| windows that pop up when you're trying to navigate a (hopefully)
| otherwise perfectly usable site, the ones that are intended to
| replace customer support but are fundamentally unable to, the
| ones that you'd never trust with a transaction worth $5, much
| less one worth hundreds or more.
|
| Even if this project were a rousing success by the company's
| definition, it would have ended up a useless chatbot used by very
| few people but frustrating many more.
|
| Instead, one day we're chatting about the project, and when
| talking about strategy for implementation, the product manager
| pushes back on working too early on integrating with the actual
| API calls to purchase tickets. I thought having a proof-of-
| concept for the actual functionality would be important, so if we
| ran into roadblocks we could ask other teams to provide us
| alternative APIs with enough notice at the beginning of the
| project rather than the end.
|
| The product manager said that we couldn't afford to do that,
| because if we did, we'd lose.
|
| I said "what? lose? what do you mean?"
|
| It turns out, our team was one of 3 teams competing to make the
| same project. Leadership wanted to make 3 fully implemented,
| separate systems, and the one they liked best would go live,
| while the others would wither and die.
|
| It also turns out, that our team was way behind because although
| we had some logic set up for handling edge cases in conversations
| (not great by any stretch), another team with no backend
| developers had a beautiful UI concept that handled only exact
| strings with no room for deviation on the user's part. This UI
| concept demoed well, of course, so they were the favorites.
|
| It was made clear to me by the team's technical lead that nobody
| up the management chain (including our team's direct manager) had
| ever written a line of code before, or knew what the difference
| was between backend and frontend, or a tech demo that presents
| well versus a working product, and so wouldn't be able to
| differentiate a finished product that actually purchases tickets
| from one that runs entirely on the frontend and talks to nothing
| (until launch day, of course).
|
| I was already on edge because I had been asked to test API
| integrations by using my personal credit card to purchase a real
| flight ticket and refund it because we didn't have test cards or
| even corporate cards we could use.
|
| So I resigned within a week, and my manager was furious.
|
| This story happened probably more recently than you're thinking.
|
| That was the most useless project I've ever worked on.
| nomdep wrote:
| I was assigned to a project with a tight deadline. However,
| there's a challenge: a lot had occurred previously, and the
| client who initially ordered the software is no longer
| interested. Despite this, a contract has been signed, money has
| been exchanged, and a detailed list of features must still be
| delivered. Consequently, we spent two months working diligently
| on a project that nobody truly wanted and nobody was ever going
| to use.
| thayne wrote:
| I worked on porting an application from Java to the Adobe Air
| runtime with actionscript. We were mostly targeting deskto, but
| the eventual plan was to support flash in a web app, and have an
| iPad app running with air as well. At the time flash was already
| on its way out. The project was still in progress when I left.
| But flash was dead a few years later, and afaik, that project
| never went anywhere.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| Still pretty early in my career, but this is probably the most
| pointless thing I worked on. The company I work at, we do
| statement generation, our clients have clients that they bill
| monthly. The statement system on a set day of the month generates
| the statements and applies any charges with their customers not
| paying their bill on time. First part, the system itself did not
| allow customization on which day. All of our clients who use it,
| it is always done on the last day of the month. First part as to
| why what I later wrote was useless, it should have been built for
| our clients to customize the day in the first place. So, we had a
| client ask to be able to run statements on separate date. My
| original plan was to allow for date selection, obvious? The owner
| of the company I work for didn't like that, instead he wanted a
| button that our client would have go and remember to press on
| every month on their selected day of the month. Also, some more
| background, client was saying this feature was required and they
| were gonna leave us if we didn't do it. So I did it, and I did it
| the way the owner of the company I work at wanted. The day after
| I check in the code, the client who was claiming they were gonna
| leave if we didn't do it, left anyways. So I implemented a whole
| feature that never even got used by the person it was built for,
| they never even saw it, and in probably the most useless way.
| datatrashfire wrote:
| Built a PII masking system that demasked PII for all users.
| avastmick wrote:
| Slightly tangential is the work I did on a National digital
| identity platform. It enables personal information sharing from
| trusted sources (birth records, tax records, banks) and could
| simply enable true/false responses to queries such as "Are you
| over 18" instead of sadly spraying PI data everywhere to be lost
| or stolen.
|
| We as a team worked super hard and were super proud of what the
| platform could do. We even won some awards. But due to politics
| and bureaucracy its capabilities were never used and today the
| service is a national joke and really only used to logon to
| government services. It is going to be replaced with something
| new and shiny.
|
| Now, I look back and think why did I care so much and work so
| hard. Why was I so naive that it would be used as designed.
| lambdasmith wrote:
| Italian SPID?
| bob778 wrote:
| There's so many countries this could be: Australia, USA, UK,
| Italy, Estonia.. it's almost a national pass time
| purple-leafy wrote:
| Not for work but for fun.
|
| I made a notebook that could be saved as a bookmark. So when you
| run the bookmark it would reopen the notebook where you left off.
|
| The bookmark was basically a JavaScript executable that saved
| data to itself and printed its own contents to the screen.
|
| A cross device Quine without a server
| exikyut wrote:
| Browsers don't have a bookmark API that lets you rewrite the
| contents of bookmarklets et al.
|
| How did it rewrite itself?
|
| Also, are you referring to something like a Jupyter notebook?
| purple-leafy wrote:
| Here's a link to it to try yourself :)
| https://github.com/con-dog/serverless-architecture
|
| I should Have added more context. As you write in the
| notebook/notepad, it updates a visual link at the bottom of
| the note. The link says "Drag me to the bookmarks bar". You
| can drag it and it re-saves the executable including its data
| and timestamps the bookmark.
|
| From memory it rewrites itself because the link itself is
| self-hosting state and executable of the page itself. That's
| the Quine part, so when you save that link you're saving the
| entire notebook "engine" + the state. Was really fun to make
| in an evening
|
| Nah it's just a plain notebook/notepad, but I was also
| thinking of making something similar as a JavaScript scratch
| pad too that works in the same way, but would be an IDE +
| runnable snippets. Same concept, a Quine + bookmarklet that
| can sync between devices without a server
| yosito wrote:
| I'm working on a rebuild of an existing app. The existing app
| works great, but hasn't changed for like 5 years so management
| thinks it's "outdated". They paid a design firm to make a
| "modern" design, but it honestly looks worse and hasn't been
| thought through at all on a practical level. The old app had a
| tightly coupled front end and back end. The new app is using the
| same back end via a non-RESTful API that has a lot of non-
| sensical dependencies on the old front end. There are a series of
| other really bad decisions made in the rebuild process, and the
| whole project is now almost a year behind schedule. The end
| result is going to be buggy, slow, and far less useful than the
| old app. But hey, they are giving me a steady stream of billable
| work, and keep paying me, so who am I to question the logic of
| management?
| anacrolix wrote:
| Every project except the last one.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| This passage from _The Tao of Programming_ comes to mind.
|
| BOOK 7: Corporate Wisdom
|
| https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
|
| _[7.1] A novice asked the Master: "In the East, there is a great
| tree-structure that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is
| bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It
| issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go Hence!' or 'Go
| Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are
| put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an
| unnatural entity exist?"_
|
| _The Master replied: "You perceive this immense structure and
| are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take
| amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the
| untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches?
| Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"_
| Cyberdog wrote:
| My marriage.
|
| But for real, the first full-time programming gig I had was at a
| place that displayed huge tables of stock prices or something
| like that - I don't recall the exact data or why we were
| providing it, but I do remember the problem that I was assigned
| to solving: the tables of data were so large that on modest
| computers and those newfangled smartphones, system performance
| would drag to a crawl.
|
| I was tasked with solving this problem, but not tasked with
| solving it in a particular way. This would have been around 2007,
| so IE 6 was the primary target, and if jQuery was out yet, it
| wasn't widely used yet.
|
| After a good deal of experimentation, the solution I came up with
| was kind of ridiculous - the page would load the table, then
| remove all but the first two screen-heights of rows and replace
| it with a single row with a CSS height parameter set to the sum
| of all the other rows in the table. As the user scrolled through
| the table, rows of data were added below the existing rows while
| the footer "megarow" was shrunk, while a header "megarow" was
| created and set to the height of rows of data that were removed.
| The experience was flawless if you didn't scroll too fast or use
| the home/end keys, but even if you did you just saw a flash of an
| empty table row before the correct rows were loaded into place.
| It worked really well.
|
| Anyway, that took up the bulk of my first three weeks working
| there before some higher-up took a look at the books and decided
| they needed to start laying people off in reverse order that they
| were fired - which I guess makes sense if you don't want to be
| bothered to do an evaluation of someone's skill, but still, it
| was pretty offputting to lose my first real dev job that way. To
| this day I have no idea if that code ever saw production - the
| product was an expensive subscription service so I had no way of
| checking up on it inexpensively.
|
| Fortunately I was able to rebound and get another dev gig through
| a friend of my stepfather, and I've continued to hack away ever
| since.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| Long story short: I worked on a software that would use CD-RWs to
| store personal data and do some computations. It required an
| internet connection, some storage, and could be use everywhere
| without installation.
|
| I was young and naive, but when I bought my first smartphone (HTC
| in the 2000s), I said to myself "we're doomed" because the whole
| company was being rendered useless in front of me. The whole
| thing could be replaced by a small Android application that I
| built for myself to learn that new stuff.
|
| 10 engineers worked on that for 5 years, and it was thrown in the
| trash while I rewrote the whole thing in a few weeks.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Working on useless things is especially common in large
| enterprises; I worked on departmental stuff that was just there
| to burn budgets so next year they could get bigger budgets:
| software that is never used and never actually touched but is
| produced nonetheless. The pay was great but it didn't feel good
| to spend time and effort on something that literally would be
| tossed on delivery.
| bmitc wrote:
| All of them? I do wonder if anything I have ever worked on has
| actually been useful in a real, honest sense. Yes, people use
| stuff I've worked on or been a part of and possibly still even do
| (and there's plenty of stuff that wasn't used at all or canceled
| similar to your story), but it's hard to know the projects'
| _actual_ usefulness. Perhaps it depends on the definition of
| useful. I 'd say that if something makes someone or something
| safer, happier, healthier, or some other similar criteria, then
| that was useful. But I'm not sure I've worked on anything like
| that, and I'm not sure most people do either.
| yhager wrote:
| You've basically summarized David Graeber's book - Bullshit
| Jobs[1]. Highly recommended.
|
| [1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-
| Jobs/David-G...
| wwilim wrote:
| I worked for nearly two years on a skunkworks project
| spearheading the use of ML.NET in a part of the company that was
| run by classically trained data scientists using classic data
| science tools. You can imagine the pushback. On the upside, I
| worked with some of the nicest people I've met.
|
| I also briefly worked in an extension team for a company, as a
| part of a huge hiring wave of about 30 people at once. The team
| on the customer side was really cool and I was excited for the
| project. However, suspiciously little work was given to us, I was
| one of the lucky few to have something to do every day, but it
| all just seemed like filler. After a month, the CTO of that
| company gathered all of the new hires in a meeting and sheepishly
| declared that they've overestimated the scope of work and their
| budget and they're firing all the new hires with 1 month notice.
| jcbrand wrote:
| I worked for two years full-time on a consumer-facing product
| that was canned less than 6 months after launch.
|
| Spending a month on a useless pipeline doesn't seem that bad to
| me.
| intellectronica wrote:
| In the late 90s I had a short stint doing freelance work for a
| "stupid money" investor who funded the work of this weirdo post-
| modernist programmer/philosopher claiming to be developing
| something akin, I guess, to what we would now call a deep
| learning system.
|
| The claim was that the system this person was developing, when
| introduced to a lot of information, would emerge with
| "interesting" behaviour and insight. The problem was that nobody
| except for the author knew how to interface with that system,
| which was just a dense and highly idiosyncratic codebase in C
| manipulating data structures. And so my role was to learn about
| that system and build a UI that will allow mere mortals to use
| it.
|
| After a few frustrating and very confusing weeks not really
| managing to understand what that system actually does (and
| therefore what an appropriate user interface would be) I finally
| got to read through the code (taking advantage of the main
| author, who normally guarded his creation and didn't allow anyone
| to look at it too closely, being absent for a few days). It
| quickly became clear to me that this system doesn't really do
| anything useful at all. It was more post-modern poetry than code.
|
| When I tried to talk to the investor about the situation I was
| made to understand that this is not something we're going to be
| discussing openly. I guess he sort of knew but for whatever
| reasons liked keeping things ambiguous. In order to be able to
| deliver _something_ for my fees, I prepared a cute little Windows
| UI that technically connected to that system but really only used
| it as a random number generator, had some buttons and sliders,
| and presented all kinds of cool graphics. They were very happy
| with the result and I soon moved on to other works.
| attilakun wrote:
| Why was the investor okay with this?
| intellectronica wrote:
| My guess is this was small change for him and he enjoyed the
| adventure somehow.
| jiqiren wrote:
| Digg v4. I started at Digg as employee 30 or something close to
| that. When v4 was being designed I was (among others) very much
| not supportive of the concept. I did the work they asked of me
| and about ~4 months before launch I was fired.
|
| Some Digg colleagues reached out asking why I decided to leave...
| since that is what digg internally announced. This is when I
| understand a number of others before me were also fired and not
| just "deciding to pursue other opportunities".
|
| EDIT: to be clear I don't fault them for firing me. People not
| onboard for a decision made by leadership in a startup are fair
| game to be fired. You need people to believe in the product and I
| definitely wasn't a believer.
|
| Anyway I had 60-90days (can't remember deadline) to exercise my
| options or let them expire. I decided to let them expire since I
| thought v4 was a bad direction. Honestly I was very stressed
| about this decision but I went with my gut. Saved me half a house
| worth of money.
| allan_s wrote:
| Do you guys remember that blog whe a guy describe his worst
| project which started utterly complicated and ended with a static
| web page with a phone number on it ? I Think it qualifies
| Tade0 wrote:
| I used to be a part of a 40-person strong team trying to deliver
| a glorified contact form based on an MVP which was originally
| done in Ruby on Rails in three months.
|
| Spent half a year there, after which my sub-team's component was
| removed from scope and the sub-team in question dissolved.
|
| I'm still in touch with most of my squad several years after
| that, as we had great chemistry, but the project itself
| reportedly went way over time and budget(despite shrinking the
| staff to less than half), costing the department that was
| responsible for it a significant chunk of its budget.
|
| I guess the real use of the project were all the friendships we
| made along the way.
| Intermernet wrote:
| I'm not in tech anymore. I'm now in Industrial Rope Access,
| specializing in geo-stabilization.
|
| One of the projects I've worked on involved the installation
| (thankfully not by my team) of a very expensive, over-engineered
| rock-fall catch-fence. At the top of a ridge.
| teapot7 wrote:
| My story is a very small one compared to most peoples - a few
| hours of work on the side, spanning a couple of weeks - but it
| think it sets a pretty high bar for pointlessnes:
|
| This was back when:
|
| - the internet was new and exciting, rather than just part of the
| background of our lives
|
| - people used video tape recorders
|
| - "multimedia" was a field of its own, and people made a fuss
| about it
|
| I got a contract to write a program in Macromedia Director (which
| was what ruled the multimedia roost before an upstart program
| called "Flash" came along) which would take a number of still
| pictures and emit them as a short Quicktime movie, with each
| picture only on screen for a couple of frames. Definitely not the
| hardest bit of work I've ever done.
|
| What was it for? Someone had had the idea that the best way of
| getting real estate ads in front of people was to make a 15 or 20
| second movie consisting of dozens of static real estate ads,
| which would be broadcast on TV at the end of... what? Some news
| or current affairs show I think. Potential homebuyers would tape
| this on their VCRs and the go through it frame by frame,
| carefully reading each ad.
|
| As you can imagine, this was before people had much bandwidth,
| and long before real estate moved online.
|
| By some miracle this actually got aired a couple of times before
| the idea sunk into oblivion.
| lakomen wrote:
| Real-time forum software with a Go backend and Angular frontend.
| 2 years wasted. Angular went through many version upgrades. Go
| was using gorm v1. Switched to Vue 2, then Vue 3 came out. Simply
| lost motivation to continue working on it, I would've had to
| rewrite the backend, but it had a tightly coupled change
| notification websocket component. Meh. Maybe one day I will. But
| as it is, I've wasted 2 years on this. The Vue 2 frontend would
| also have to be upgraded to Vue 3. Too much. Too much...
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| In the mid-2000's I worked for a mid-sized utility company, and I
| know there's many folks out there who have systems that are held
| together with scotch-tape and bits of twine, but this was the
| worst data warehouse and BI reporting system I'd ever
| experienced. So the CEO decides, after reading an ad in an in-
| flight magazine, that we need to upgrade to some enterprise-grade
| system. Cue a tender process, and a well-known enterprise
| software vendor comes out on top and gets six months to design
| and plug in the system.
|
| What I didn't know at the time, and came only to realize much
| later, is that these enterprise software vendors and integrators
| tend to put their A-team onto winning new business, holding back
| some hapless goons for the actual implementation if and when that
| comes around.
|
| I was managing a team of BI analysts, data scientists and
| assorted "KPI reporting" heads. First thing the implementation
| team does is look for a list of all current reports and their
| data sources. OK, nothing odd there, but roll forward about four
| months and there's a weekly status update meeting where the
| vendor casually mentions that the data warehouse will be locked
| down to producing exact facsimiles of the current reporting, with
| no other access allowed for running other queries. Future reports
| or changes would have to be routed through the vendor for
| development.
|
| This of course kicked off a major sh!tshow, where I had to go to
| the CEO and tell him that unless he wanted to be signing cheques
| to the vendor forever more, we'd better get some appropriate
| permissions on the data warehouse and BI reporting system.
|
| After lots of difficult shouty meetings with the vendor, despite
| their threats to hold back support from their own work, we got
| access and could continue to do some work. However, the vendor
| argued that they'd need to place a couple of "senior support
| engineers" on staff to ensure smooth operations from our
| meddling. These guys turned out to be some fresh college
| graduates who didn't have English as a first language, but ended
| up costing the company about 150k/year each for them to sit at a
| desk and play minesweeper all day.
|
| Lots of hard lessons learned, I was way too naive thinking that
| vendors just want to sell stuff, plus occasional support - rather
| than take over an entire function for cash.
| theusus wrote:
| Created a frontend for a friend and he didn't use it.
| nkmnz wrote:
| My university degree.
| 3371 wrote:
| I was working in a a 2-3 men group, which the manager of the tram
| directly reports to the big boss for the company.
|
| The so called "tech dev team" are responsible for all sorts of
| tasks, for example exploring new tech, prototyping, supporting
| product team with optimization or content production.
|
| We had been supporting system design and development in a new
| Unity (game) project for half a year, things were fine, and then
| the project got frozen/archived/cancelled.
|
| And the reason was simple, our big boss wanted to svalr new
| heights! Something just like the one he made ~20 years ago and
| still feeding the company. He wanted to concentrate resources on
| this new ambitious project of his.
|
| So that was it, the end of a 10+ men project, we got assigned to
| different task then. And then again. Then again.
|
| Sometimes we just experiented techs. Sometimes we worked on
| projects that is not promising at all from our view. Sometimes we
| took over a good project and altered it into a abomination.
|
| As my first job in my career, I'd say it certainly harmed my
| passion. I really really hope I can works on something
| poilsitively meaningful and impactful/useful to the world or even
| just certain audience.
|
| I am probably only qualified as junior go/.net developer, but if
| there's such opportunity please let me know.
| any1 wrote:
| I once worked for a multi-national food processing automation
| company.
|
| We had an internal control system based on RT_PREEMPT Linux and
| busybox. This system was created before buildroot and yocto
| became a thing. It was compatible with the company's previous
| control system, which ran on bare-metal 68k. I was on the team
| that maintained and developed this Linux based system. This all
| ran on hardware that was developed and manufactured in-house.
|
| The company had also acquired many smaller companies over the
| years, all of which came with their own way of doing things. Most
| used PLC, but not always from the same vendor, some even used
| elaborate mechanical clockwork.
|
| The Linux based stuff was actually pretty good for gluing all
| this stuff together.
|
| At some point, a consulting company came in, and shortly after
| that, the management decided that the company should focus on its
| "core competencies". So, they hired a guy to find a replacement
| for _all_ the different control systems within the company: One
| system to rule them all. It was to replace all the software and
| the hardware.
|
| We told them, that they should rather focus on creating and
| documenting common interfaces; replacing everything was very
| clearly an impossible task. They ignored this advice, entered a
| contract with a single PLC company and deprecated the system that
| I was working on along with everything else.
|
| A few years later, they fired that guy they hired and the CTO,
| but in the meantime, we all kept working on the "deprecated"
| systems while the replacement was "just around the corner".
|
| Anyway, whether they were going to proceed or not didn't really
| matter to me. It's all about the journey, not the destination.
| You can keep learning whether you're doing something useful or
| not. You can still craft software to the best of your abilities
| and take pride in the art. In fact, don't think of yourself as a
| software engineer. Think of yourself as a software artist!
| bkitano19 wrote:
| https://hootdoogs.com/ - "find food between you guys"
| sodimel wrote:
| A weather plugin for django-cms using darksky api. Finished it,
| less than a month later darksky was acquired by apple and said
| that the api will stop working soon.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I've done plenty of useless things in my career, and had more
| than my fair share of projects that ended up being shelved and
| never used, but, sometimes, I make useless things on purpose.
|
| https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode
|
| Please enjoy.
| aeroxis wrote:
| I worked at a government contractor and they were deploying a
| custom Java app on tomcat in windows. Entire team was into manual
| deployment and I was the DevOps engineer hired to automate. I
| worked for a year fighting all kinds of pushbacks and ultimately
| got it done. When I was leaving, the you who was going to run it,
| said "ansible is too complicated, we don't need it after you
| leave."
|
| And that ladies and gentlemen, is the most useless project I've
| worked on. Hey atleast I got paid I guess.
| latexr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You are far from alone.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_job
| MPSimmons wrote:
| >my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments
| meticulously requested by this guy in my team
|
| I've worked with someone like that. He didn't last long a the
| company.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Decades ago, CITS. It was a system to keep track of "Corporate
| Inventory In Transient". The idea was to track inventory in
| Trucks.
|
| This may seem useful, but with what I know now, it was to track
| inventory for a reason that was border-line illegal. During
| Inventory time, trucks would be loaded up and they would cruse
| the Highways until the Inventory was over. They wanted a way to
| know what inventory was on a sightseeing trip.
|
| That company went out of business over 30 years ago and no longer
| exists.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| So, I once had a contract at an ad agency, which was getting into
| the business of making software for food-related clients. Our
| first customer of this sort, was a chain of cupcake stores. Their
| CEO had just come in from a hamburger chain, and wanted to
| replace their (functional, bespoke) website and factory (i.e.
| kitchen) management software, with an outside off-the-shelf
| solution. We were to make the website and the glue logic to the
| outside product they had chosen.
|
| The cupcake company's CTO took paternity leave shortly after the
| project began.
|
| We asked about the back-office software, which interfaced with
| the kitchens, on a couple of occasions, and were told not to
| worry about it, the third party standard solution would handle
| that.
|
| So, with a week to go, the cupcake CEO finally shows the product
| to his regional managers. They ask, "where's the part that tells
| us to put make this much of this kind of frosting, and when in
| the day to do it? and make this much of red velvet cake, starting
| three hours before it's needed?"
|
| It turns out, the third party solution was for sandwich and
| burger places, where you would just make the food when it was
| ordered. For cupcakes, it needed to combine the needs of multiple
| different orders, take into account how many hours it would take
| to make each flavor of cake and frosting, and tell the kitchen
| staff what to do, and when. The cupcake CEO had only ever run a
| burger place, he had no idea about any of this, and didn't want
| anybody like the CTO telling him his idea wouldn't work.
|
| So, he asked us if we could update our glue logic to also talk to
| the old software, so that it would continue to run the kitchens,
| while the new website took the orders. We said sure, here's how
| much it would cost.
|
| Oh, he said, we wanted it as part of the previous quote.
|
| The final meeting, wherein we explained that we had done what he
| had asked us to, was not attended by the cupcake CEO, he sent his
| new CTO (the old one had quit right after his paternity leave was
| up). Every permanent employee of my company slipped out, and I,
| the contractor, was left for the last part, to explain that no,
| we would not be building any software not in the original quote,
| for free.
|
| The entire project went into the dump. The former CTO of the
| cupcake company, started work for the company that had made the
| original, bespoke software that was still running things.
| dmje wrote:
| We got employed by a very rich and very eccentric retired
| businessman to help create an online exhibition for his
| collection of antique items. I won't mention what the items are,
| but think historically significant, extraordinarily rare,
| stupendously expensive.
|
| We flew over to see him with a creative proposal for the site,
| got the go-ahead, and spent the next 6 months creating and
| building. We started to get content for the site, via his "team"
| (a student just out of college, nice guy but totally
| inexperienced in ...anything much).
|
| As we got to the go-live date it became clear that things (as
| ever) were going to slip on the content side of things. The head
| guy was extremely meticulous, and the site contained a lot of
| video content - everything was shot at the highest quality, and
| there were maybe 300 videos to do, plus lots of photographs for
| each item, plus text content which needed to be researched as
| well.
|
| We'd stressed all along (as we always, always do...) that content
| is almost always the first thing that causes bottlenecks in our
| line of work - we hit all our deadlines, but the content was just
| excruciatingly slow to extract. Nothing new for us, but we then
| went back to the client and suggested that rather than waiting
| for everything to be in place he roll out the site with all the
| content we had (about 25%) and basically go live - then iterate
| as more content arrived. In this particular context this makes
| perfect sense - as individual items were completed we could have
| published them, they could have done some PR about each one, nice
| "trickle content" to keep the SEO and social media gods happy.
|
| But: the head guy was not of the "go live and iterate" mindset
| ...at all. We finished all the design and dev work, and a year
| went by. I emailed the "team" guy on a regular basis, pushing for
| the site to go live. Round about now it turned out that everyone
| on the staff was absolutely terrified of head guy - if he said
| jump, they all said how high, and absolutely no-one on the client
| side was prepared to push him at all.
|
| Another 6 months went by, and next time I emailed a totally
| different person who knew nothing about the project answered the
| email. Turns out the entire team had been replaced - so we
| started from scratch, trained people up on content editing,
| kicked off project meetings again... and then nothing.
|
| This started a cycle that basically went on for ...8 years :-/
|
| We'd work on the thing for a bit, the team would change, we'd re-
| train, content would trickle in - rinse and repeat.
|
| Obviously, all the energy and enthusiasm had gone by this time,
| the original design and build needed some serious refreshing
| anyway, and all the original project aims had sort of gone out
| the window in the intervening years.
|
| After 9 years, we got dumped, and a new guy came on board to
| deliver the site. Luckily we had solid contractual stuff in
| place, so we billed our last 20% and walked away.
|
| 2 years later I noticed that the site had finally gone live - a
| complete rebuild, a complete new redesign. And, I have to say -
| with some slightly bitter pleasure - it's really terrible :-)
|
| I have bumped into 2 more types of exactly head guy's mentality
| over the past 25 years working in my area - they all share the
| same mentality: incredibly bright self made people who have
| earned a wad of cash, but with that same sense of entitlement
| which makes them completely unable to take on board anything an
| external expert brings to the table. I can now spot them from a
| mile off: they may be extremely rich and on the face of it
| excellent people to do work for, but f** that, when this
| particular personal klaxon goes off I now just say no...
| anyonecancode wrote:
| I was at a fairly well-known company that was on a downward
| financial trajectory. The company had some solid products that
| customers loved, and that was gaining new users, but the overall
| management of the company had led it to have an enormous,
| unsustainable amount of debt and expenses. People were headed for
| the exits, and I was making my own plans to follow, but before I
| did so management had me switch on to another project.
|
| The project I _had_ been on was central to the successful product
| line. I had built out a central part of that system and was proud
| of how well it worked and seeing the usage and revenue growth
| from it. The _new_ product was... changing the payment processing
| system we used for accepting credit cards. I mean, sure, a more
| flexible payment processing flow is a helpful improvement, but at
| a time of existential risk to the company, _this_ is what we
| should be focused on?
|
| And actually, it was more than that -- the new flow had some kind
| of complex integration with a system provided by an outside
| vendor. And involved lots of sync meetings. Lots and lots of sync
| meetings. And every meeting would involve explanations by
| contractors (who seemed to multiply by the week) as to why we
| were behind schedule, and questions by me trying to get some
| documentation on the API I was supposed to interface with, and
| explanations of why the people on this call didn't have that info
| but I should set up a meeting with a different team of the
| vendor...
|
| I assume there was some kind of kick back or other tie between
| the execs who approved this program and the vendor, as this
| project seemed more about pumping money out of a dying company
| and into this outside vendor than any kind of rational business
| strategy. I did move on after too long, and that previous
| employer is now officially bankrupt.
| maxslch wrote:
| Most of even all of my work for a product design agency.
|
| I'm gladly out now but it's a hell I don't with anyone to go
| through, even just for experience, it's exhausting and at the end
| of the day you can't even mention that you worked for that X
| project
|
| May not be every agency but in general how design agencies work
| is pretty awful compared to freelancing, productized agency
| concept etc.
|
| Spend hundreds of hours on our own projects also to end up semi
| dead, due to directors lack of time and willingness to delegate,
| share ownership.
|
| For those startup projects also it's not super valuable, they
| just want you to deliver something they can throw back to their
| investors and get another round, to eventually sell it and start
| over, while you as a design contractor - done most of the product
| thinking, brand and marketing.
|
| Could've as well put our own product out like that
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Not me, but "the other team".
|
| Industrial project, new machines to do new things, and the
| companies internal + one external team were tasked to buid an
| "enterprise grade" software to manage and control the process,
| show analytics, trends, etc., for everyone from the line worker
| to management, marketing etc.
|
| They were working on it for a about a year and were maybe half-
| done, when the machines had to start the work, so they hired us
| (a third outside company) to "hack something up". It was a
| complex machine, configured internally, so basically it was just
| check if there was enough material (on a scale) on the "input"
| side, check that the output (a scale again) was not "full" (both
| configurable in a config file), trigger the machine to do its
| job, and save the diagnostic number (6 values) together with
| numbers for the scales to a database + grafana for
| visualizations. The machine was even smart enough to not start
| the work without material on the input and stop if the output was
| clogged, so even if we screwed it up, it wouldn't matter.
|
| Two days later, we had a working prototype, a year later the
| internal team was still working on the software, and the
| "prototype" was still in production, then that project got
| dumped, and the ~100 lines of python on a raspberrypi (it was
| just a "prototype", just for a few weeks... yeah) are still
| running the machine... and still is.
| cutemonster wrote:
| I wonder, the ones who ordered the enterprise grade project,
| what was their background and amount of software and technical
| knowledge?
|
| Interesting!
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| The company bosses wanted it... the same ones that hired us
| for the "temporary solution"... we could charge a lot,
| because they were in a hurry, and couldn't find anyone else,
| so it was a good situation for us, but we were definitely
| cheaper than those two "enterprise grade" teams :)
| diamondfist25 wrote:
| I spent 1 year implementing Auth after some architect green
| lighted it, and 1 yr later with resources piled in, it was barely
| useful.
|
| Using existing solution would've taken 2 month and works
| cess11 wrote:
| When corporations stop being small they commonly turn plagued
| with some of the issues the centrally planned soviet economy had,
| unless the executives and bosses realise they are in a centrally
| planned organisation and meticulously guard against such
| problems.
|
| I suspect that explains some of the examples in the thread.
|
| Sometimes you also put people on busywork so you don't have to
| fire them, because you don't want them going to your competitors
| or have to go through the drudgery of hiring replacements later
| on when the times have changed again.
|
| Once me and my two developer colleagues were put on building an
| extension for an existing SaaS-product, the assumption from the
| higher-ups were that another customer segment that is also
| subsidised by the government would be profitable to sell the
| product to. One board member with background in Google couldn't
| keep his fingers out of it so it boiled down to putting two
| people who had never built software with static typing or the
| regular mess of web client tooling suddenly having to use
| TypeScript and a bulky UI lib based on Vue.
|
| We spent four months, one 'man-year', me trying to both put out
| fires in production and figure out how we were to tack on TS onto
| the horrifying PHP application we had and also teach my teammates
| how to approach problem solving with static typing and 'reactive'
| (or whatever the kids call Vue-related frameworks). In the end we
| managed one view with a decent search form that sent a string and
| rendered some rows with pagination. At that time fires in
| production started to threaten cash flow so it got shelved.
|
| It was a crappy idea to begin with, the new market had very
| different characteristics and actors in it many hard demands that
| we would have needed to spend quite some time, probably upwards a
| year in a setting my colleagues were comfortable with rather than
| TypeScript. Having an almost trivial integration with the tax
| authority to ease using that subsidy didn't change that, it
| turned out.
| jl6 wrote:
| Early in my career I worked on a Very Important and Very Serious
| project. Boy was it Important. Serious too! At least, that's what
| everybody said. My part was translating some ancient programs
| written in an obsolete proprietary actuarial modelling language,
| into a much more modern programming language (itself still a
| janky ancient thing, but at least it was still within its support
| contract).
|
| This translation and migration project had been going for _years_
| before I got involved. It had been going for so long that none of
| the original staff that commissioned it or designed it were still
| around. Needless to say, the people that wrote the _original_
| actuarial programs were long departed, some retired, some no
| longer alive.
|
| I inherited the task of adapting a handful of programs to run in
| a test environment. There was absolutely no documentation, of
| either the code or the programming system. We had to guess and
| run experiments on what particular bits of syntax did. As well as
| creating a like-for-like replica of the original system, we also
| had to fix various known issues (the promise of fixing the issues
| was how the project got funded by the business; the simultaneous
| migration to the new platform was how the project got approved by
| the enterprise architects). There had been attempts at writing
| specs for what _should_ happen - but even the actuaries who
| supposedly owned the outputs of these programs didn 't understand
| them. There were furious, intractable debates about what parts
| should be fixed, and what parts should remain the same. One camp
| argued that nothing should be fixed, because then they would have
| to explain to the auditors/regulators why the previous
| calculations hadn't been right. Mass confusion reigned, staff
| churned, months dragged on. Nobody thought the project was a good
| idea any more, but the project was uncancellable because these
| fixes were viewed as a mandatory resolution to a longstanding
| risk that the execs had on their all-powerful risk register.
|
| The project eventually got to a state where all the new programs
| at least ran without errors and produced some output. I had left
| the project by this point, but I was still in a position where I
| could observe the terrible consequences.
|
| A new financial year arrived, and it was declared that This Is
| It. The new programs were going live, no matter what. Of course,
| a big switchover was too risky, so they kept the old system
| running in parallel, to do various live proving tests. Some
| people were heroes for finally getting the project over the line.
| Other people were immediately drafted onto a new project: a
| project to fix all the problems that the previous project had
| deferred.
|
| History repeated itself. The new "fix" project dragged on, and
| on, and on. The actuaries kept running tests comparing old and
| new outputs. Horrifyingly expensive consultants were brought in
| to complete expert analysis. Some genius exec eventually
| concluded that since the original project had closed, the risk
| must have been resolved. The "fix" project slowed, staff
| dissipated, and eventually it was placed on a kind of indefinite
| hold without ever being properly closed down.
|
| I next encountered this a few years later, when the "new"
| programming environment was due to be migrated to a still-newer
| platform. A whole lot of money was spent migrating these Very
| Important live programs. Of course, the ancient system was still
| running, and nobody was using the outputs of the new system (but
| nobody would categorically sign off that they would _never_ be
| used). Still, they got migrated over to the _new_ new platform,
| where they ran happily for several years, consuming hours of
| batch time and producing hundreds of gigabytes of output each
| month, all unused. Eventually, they were quietly (but
| expensively) decommissioned .
|
| Millions of dollars spent, man-decades of time expended.
| Absolutely no useful result.
|
| Last I heard, the ancient programs were still running, with all
| their original flaws, and since they were concerned with long-
| term pension plans, they will need to keep running for several
| decades to come, until all the policyholders are dead.
| projectileboy wrote:
| Once spent a year building middleware to integrate money
| transfers with an ATM network. As we're going to pilot,
| competitor buys the ATM network. End of project, thanks for your
| time. I have a couple more like that.
| nomercy400 wrote:
| Once upon a time I did a project for a city IT department.
|
| They were in the process of moving from paper to digital forms.
| This meant for each field in a form updating about eight
| different data objects across three data abstractions. Imagine a
| form with thirty fields.
|
| Now this is tedious and prone to error, but it gets worse
|
| The form I was working on was not well thought out, but we had to
| build it anyway. So on the first demo to the functional
| designers, or 'stakeholders', we pointed out several oversights,
| which we were asked to correct. And ofcourse process some other
| changes they found themselves. This is half the fields in the
| form, so we already did a lot of useless work. But it gets worse.
|
| The form in question was about the city being able to judge if
| somebody would be entitled to benefits. Citizens with benefits
| would be asked to volunarily fill in this form, and judged if
| they could keep their benefits. Yes, voluntarily. Would you fill
| in a form, which could make you lose monthly income? Or not fill
| it in, and keep your benefits?
|
| Pointing this out had no effect. For me, the form was useless,
| and so was the technical implementation.
|
| I left that month.
| democracy wrote:
| It was a project that wasn't going to get funding in the next
| year and was meant to be shut down...
| danbmil99 wrote:
| I worked on an army funded project designing software and
| simulations for a robot that had been canceled. But the money was
| budgeted so the work had to continue otherwise I guess someone
| would have had to give the money back or something?
| Tainnor wrote:
| At least two times in my career I've (almost solo) worked on pet
| projects of a CTO or similar that were assigned almost no other
| resources and weren't really aligned with other stakeholders.
|
| It was usually fun while it lasted but then inevitably it would
| just be scrapped.
|
| Also, one time my team hired a freelancer but in order to justify
| him to upper management we had to invent some extra project to
| implement. It turned out to be all in vain anyway, since the
| whole team was let go one year later.
| wojciii wrote:
| Ages ago I worked for a German company who developed electronic
| parts. They had a large Finnish client. I worked on porting an OS
| for use in a mobile phone. We went to Finland to integrate and
| make sure everything worked. We ran tests and debugged. This took
| 3 days and we were done .. the company wanted me to stay for a
| whole week because they didn't bother to change the flight. I
| managed to convince them that it was not in their best interest
| to make my angry and stay at a hotel for the remainder of the
| week with nothing to do.
| [deleted]
| psyclobe wrote:
| Aparavi
| to11mtm wrote:
| Depends on the context.
|
| 1. A significant 're-architecting' of parts of our backend to
| metaphorically sell cars off the back of a truck... It was one of
| the few parts of an auto lease financier's chain that didn't have
| a called-out contract with one of the major players. I suppose
| this one wasn't entirely useless as we were able to reuse some of
| the _concepts_ for future integration work.
|
| 2. At another shop, we did an integration with a startup that was
| providing a reasonably related service. Part of the gig was we
| were going to get something like 10$ for every client signed up.
| I think the project was a good 3-5 months of 1 Sr, 1-2 normal
| devs, a BA and QA's time. In the first 12 months after launch I
| don't even think we got enough to cover a weeks worth of pizza
| for the team.
|
| 3. Was not my team but I saw it happen, one of the above shops
| also wound up deciding 'Everyone should use the same ORM because
| cogs in a machine'. This included having a fully in production
| product port their entire app's NHibernate logic to EF6 on Oracle
| 11... This did not end well for the project at all, as on top of
| being a huge timesink to get things 'working', performance tanked
| and it hurt the project's already heavy maintenance costs.
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