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
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Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
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Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#22I'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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#23I'm trying to think of a single actually useful thing I ever worked on..
You have worked on earning money to live in your world. Good job. Don't over think work.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#24At 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#25I 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
But that is useful. You use it everyday, that counts.
100% happy user base is really something to be proud of.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#26> 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#27How 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?"
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#28I'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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#29I'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.
Something like buspirate might work
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#30I’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.