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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?

#581

Post by jiqiren »

Digg v4. I started at Digg as employee 30 or something close to that. When v4 was being designed I was (among others) very much not supportive of the concept. I did the work they asked of me and about ~4 months before launch I was fired.

Some Digg colleagues reached out asking why I decided to leave… since that is what digg internally announced. This is when I understand a number of others before me were also fired and not just “deciding to pursue other opportunities”.

EDIT: to be clear I don’t fault them for firing me. People not onboard for a decision made by leadership in a startup are fair game to be fired. You need people to believe in the product and I definitely wasn’t a believer.

Anyway I had 60-90days (can’t remember deadline) to exercise my options or let them expire. I decided to let them expire since I thought v4 was a bad direction. Honestly I was very stressed about this decision but I went with my gut. Saved me half a house worth of money.

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

#582

Post by whstl »

primax wrote: post #565
calvinmorrison wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite.

I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times I've been on the receiving end, working at companies undergoing a large migration.

It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere in the system. Death by thousand papercuts.

There is no incentive from both sides to change: the company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees don't want to change how they work (because change is often stressful), and the person paying the bills is not getting the full picture.

If there's anything that is actually really "unique" (in a good way), then you spend money. Often this means not customizing the ERP, but actually writing new software that integrates with it.

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

#583

Post by whstl »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #569
calvinmorrison wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not really anyone saying "you're doing the task wrong", it's more like "you're doing it only so slightly differently that we need a few months to write customizations for it. We'll send you the bill".

Those big ERPs are not really blank canvases, but when you need those micro-customizations in the wrong place, they can become one.

End users involved in the integration don't really want to learn new processes or even do things slightly different, as they know that changing process often involves burning a lot of political capital and they often lack awareness to know that "just using the ERP the way it's intended" is cheaper. And consultants are experts in finding a chance to perform those micro changes. It's a perfect marriage.

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

#584

Post by jpc0 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #522
thayne wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You clearly have no idea how complex routing is if that is your take on this.

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

#585

Post by hnlmorg »

sanderjd wrote: post #80

Oh I thought this was gonna be that like the entire product / company / idea was useless, not just like a small number of weeks' worth of work. I've probably created a hundred or more proofs of concept for things that turned out to be a bad idea. Say these averaged out to a week or so of work each, and that's about two full years of useless work. And that's ok! Most stuff you work on will get thrown away before you l…

A proof of concept is t really the same thing as a lot of the stories here because the entire point of a POC is to literally prove if a concept works (the clue is in the name). If a concept doesn’t work then that’s still a successful POC because you’ve then saved more time that would have been spent building out a MVP.

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

#587

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

duderific wrote: post #353
delecti wrote: post #155

It was at Amazon and I don't remember exactly what the service was called, I think it was AdSomething. It was while I worked on the Kindle Special Offers (taking advantage of the "off" screen of an e-ink Kindle to show ads) project. I find that to be one of the less offensive forms of advertising, so I was generally pretty happy on that team for a time. But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a s…

I always marvel at how bizarre it is that there's a permanent ad on the Kindle even when it's "off". The books they recommend are never pertinent to me in the slightest.

I feel like this exists so that people who use their kindle will pay trn bucks to turn it off.

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

#588

Post by Tade0 »

I used to be a part of a 40-person strong team trying to deliver a glorified contact form based on an MVP which was originally done in Ruby on Rails in three months.

Spent half a year there, after which my sub-team's component was removed from scope and the sub-team in question dissolved.

I'm still in touch with most of my squad several years after that, as we had great chemistry, but the project itself reportedly went way over time and budget(despite shrinking the staff to less than half), costing the department that was responsible for it a significant chunk of its budget.

I guess the real use of the project were all the friendships we made along the way.

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

#589

Post by jiggawatts »

jpc0 wrote: post #584
jiggawatts wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You clearly have no idea how complex routing is if that is your take on this.

A random state government department has no "business needs" that require custom IPv4 routing technology that isn't supported by the two biggest public clouds. Any such need is imagined, or an outright error.

In this particular case they were sold a product that serves one purpose: multi-cloud solutions across international boundaries where no single telco can connect all of the data centre locations.

Their handful of locations are all in one city and well-connected by multiple telcos because... they're a state government, not a multi-national corporation. They're blocked by the constitution from expanding inter-state, let alone internationally. That would be a literal act of war.

That didn't stop the vendor's sales team showing slides with titles like: "What if you need to expand into the Chinese market?".

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

#590

Post by attilakun »

intellectronica wrote: post #576

In the late 90s I had a short stint doing freelance work for a "stupid money" investor who funded the work of this weirdo post-modernist programmer/philosopher claiming to be developing something akin, I guess, to what we would now call a deep learning system. The claim was that the system this person was developing, when introduced to a lot of information, would emerge with "interesting" behaviour and insight. The p…

Why was the investor okay with this?
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