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 The existing app works great, but hasn't changed for like 5 years so management thinks it's "outdated".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?
Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
521–530 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 everythi…
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 wor…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#523Every project except the last one.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> 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.
I loved my math prof, I just suck at math. I took him twice.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 y…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#526This 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?"
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
It's inevitable that Sales will put Product in a bad spot because they're too good at selling their own innocence.
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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#528[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#529I 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 mo…
Objective-C++ already is a system for dispatching calls with a hashtable. Did they need another one?