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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?

#561

Post by frederikb »

FartinMowler wrote: post #159

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 (mortgag…

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).

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#562

Post by sgentle »

epolanski wrote: post #372
CamperBob2 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious; what law was being broken, exactly?

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.

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...

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#563

Post by cutemonster »

invalidlogin wrote: post #474
anonymouse008 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!? The…

Would you mind breaking down the situation in a little more detail? Not my field and I find your story interesting.

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?)

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#564

Post by [deleted] »

LaserDiscMan wrote: post #124

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…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#565

Post by primax »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #255
rm445 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 o…

So, basically throw out everything that made them unique and differentiated, and do things like the Germans do.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#566

Post by wwilim »

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#567

Post by caseyy »

bo1024 wrote: post #554
bombcar wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> my job is to enable higher ups to do their job Ouch, I like to think it's the other way around.

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#569

Post by AllegedAlec »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #255
rm445 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 o…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

#570

Post by Cloudef »

yhager wrote: post #560
drpixie wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

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…

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
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