Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 794 posts

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

#81

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #64
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #47

I worked for a company that used to resell a single-board computer used for control applications. The vendor was getting antsy because we were always late paying our bills. Our company owner didn't like their complaints, so I was told to design one that was "better than theirs." That's it. That was the entire spec. OK, I was also told that customer X would like a board that they can program in C (current board had a…

Wouldn't "better than theirs" then mean cheaper while still being sufficient?

Perhaps. This is why specifications should be unambiguous.

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

#82

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

ghaff wrote: post #54
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

There's definitely a difference between the utility of the final project/product and the utility to you personally based on what you learned/had fun with/got paid for along the way.

Very good point!

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

#83

Post by sanderjd »

charles_f wrote: post #42

You need to support services that are getting deprecated until the very last user leaves. And believe ne, sometimes it might take several years more than the company would like to. As long as someone is using it, you're contributing to its stability, and it's not useless. See yourself as the orchestra on the titanic, playing to the best of their craft until the ship goes under. I worked for a full year on a service w…

Yep, focusing on automation and reliability for this being-deprecated thing seems useful. The goal is to increase the likelihood that it will keep running until people actually stop using it, without anybody needing to work on it. That's useful!

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

#86

Post by throwway120385 »

I don't think your work is entirely useless here, under the assumption that the tool is deprecated but nobody has discontinued using it yet. Even deprecated tools need some maintenance from time to time, and in a big organization there's lots of legacy stuff that's kept around for a long time because replacing it is a lower priority than other roadmap items.

For a useless/meaningless project I did once, I wrote the read and announce portions of a userspace BLE stack against the BlueZ sockets in Linux because it was quicker and easier than figuring out how to use the DBus interface. It also turned out to be about 10 times faster latency wise. We needed it to do a proof of concept for something which later didn't pan out in the market. The code still lives in our repository and gets compiled into our products but nobody plugs the Bluetooth dongle that triggers its activation into any fielded product.

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

#87

Post by ramses0 »

tetha wrote: post #55
charles_f wrote: post #42

You need to support services that are getting deprecated until the very last user leaves. And believe ne, sometimes it might take several years more than the company would like to. As long as someone is using it, you're contributing to its stability, and it's not useless. See yourself as the orchestra on the titanic, playing to the best of their craft until the ship goes under. I worked for a full year on a service w…

This is indeed something my opinion shifted in the last 2 years. Some of my superiors hate it, but they are kinda getting it after some patience. The thing is: Slowly deprecating a service doesn't work. At least on my patience level, which is measured in years. I don't have decade level patience available. If you announce that a service is being decommissioned, the good teams leave across some time. This time can be…

"Change Adoption Curve" - search for some images.

I talked with a few infra-ish people at Facebook once upon a time, and they described effectively a "Service Assassination Team". ImageResizer1.0, ImageResizer9000, they were an actual funded team to hunt down and destroy (and presumably help migrate) people using ImageResizer1.0 (or whatever).

It seemed that was a very forward-thinking way of looking at things to prevent an eventual "big-ball-of-mud" pile of services.

Either that, or Bezos's insight that internal teams should have an API-charge, and each team had a budget for requests between systems. If you're on ImageResizer1.0, and the costs go up 10x or 1000x, you're instantly motivated to go and search for the recommended new alternative, or eat the increased API cost (which can then be directed to the "Service Assassination Team...")

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

#88

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

It was allegedly a front end for configuring traffic signals, allegedly to be used by the kind of Engineer (uppercase E) with licensure from the state.

It was actually just a Front. You'd buy it and then our support people (without said licensure), instead of supporting the software, would go out into the field and configure the things for you.

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

#89

Post by throwway120385 »

gonzo41 wrote: post #23
thatguyagain wrote: post #13

I'm trying to think of a single actually useful thing I ever worked on..

You have worked on earning money to live in your world. Good job. Don't over think work.

The only reason to give a damn about what you're working on is to make sure you're accumulating good bullet points for your resume.

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

#90

Post by windowshopping »

I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option.

I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle.

I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

Post reply on HN