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?
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?
#32I'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.
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."
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#33About 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
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#34chatgpt(8). It's pretty useless.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#35Did 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
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#36It 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#37As 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#38The 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#39Have 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
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#40I 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.)