381–390 of 794 posts
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.
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.
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…
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 a…
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…
If the retailer is still in business that data has probably been lovingly migrated twice, and is now in a sharepoint somewhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Is using a host that doesn't do this not a possibility?
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…
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…
In other word pointless. The only time you can even halfheartedly trust the results is when the peoples surveyed are almost adversarial- like customers.
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.
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 :)