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How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

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Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#311

Post by Cthulhu_ »

worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

I'm cynical about a lot of 'trends' that have popped up over the year, because oftentimes they're just compromises or marketing to get employees to join them. Notably, in recent years, a LOT of employers / recruiters will stuff "IoT" or "Blockchain" into their job descriptions, knowing full well they do nothing with it - or if they do, it's a couple hours a week they give up on to keep the employees happy, interested and motivated. It's a weird theater.

Most of those jobs are generic Java work, but it's hard to find motivated / qualified people to work on just that.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#312

Post by abbadadda »

samvher wrote: post #286
TedShiller wrote: post #264

I'll share a disturbing anecdote about one of the largest and most influential software companies in the world, based in the Bay Area, and I'll leave it to you to guess which one. I know of several people who work there who are ranked very highly and are paid extremely well, who have told me personally that the work they do there is terrible for the users (i.e. it's exploitative) and terrible for the internet (it int…

> They are not bad people. Very few people are "bad" people but the way you're describing it makes it pretty clear that they're making unethical choices, and they're doing so consciously. Actions speak louder than words.

The sad thing is, what are they going to do? Change it? Leave? Let's pretend each of these individuals are making $2M a year. They'll just be replaced with someone else that'll take the humongous paychecks. They could take a moral stand and leave, and I think continuing to work in that environment would be hard, but I don't fault the individual to the point I'd consider them a "bad person." Their complicity in these activities is not bad enough to warrant being angry at them, but I do feel a bit sorry for them. It is a hard choice they wouldn't have to make if there was a bit more oversight of these internet behemoths.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#313

Post by amildie »

amelius wrote: post #268
malux85 wrote: post #159

Yes, so I put analytics in to prove it. I told the project leader that nobody wants a share button there, because of the nature of the data, nobody will share it. They disagreed strongly, suddenly the share button was super important. So I put tracking on it. A year after launch, guess what? Yep that’s right, nobody clicked the button. Not a single user. So I showed them the data and told them I was right. I told the…

> So I showed them the data and told them I was right. I think we should do this more often. Measure the performance of our managers and confront them with the data.

Making the uppers look stupid is a dangerous move in the corporate world.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#314

Post by dkersten »

blauditore wrote: post #210
dkersten wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my own experience, often non-technical people will attribute things as AI that we wouldn’t, eg any basic automation. Really anything that’s in any way intelligent or seems that way. I had a project where people were excited about a feature that was basically just alerting when one value crossed over or under another... I wonder if your team could provide real value to customers providing some smart “AI” feature th…

The line of were AI starts is not well-defined. If you think about it, virtually all software can be considered AI if you put expectations low enough. From the other end, one could argue that once you understand the inner workings of a piece of AI, it just becomes a fancy algorithm to you. In the end, everything is just a piece of software converting input to output. My experience is that people tend to consider thin…

Completely agree. If its artificial (all software) and its in some way intelligent p, or appears that way, (a lot of software, or features thereof), then you could argue its artificial intelligence, based on just those two words (ignoring the definition technical people give AI). That’s why machine learning is usually more useful from a technical discussion viewpoint.

> From the other end

Yeah, using wongarsu’s example of chess: brute forcing chess was once a highlight if AI achievement and now its just a crude search algorithm.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#315

Post by kmclean »

rb808 wrote: post #77

The problem is that software no-one wants often has the best careers. I worked on a system used by many people and it was hard work, was getting 10-15 years old, held together with tape and lots of users who all had their gripes and requests. I moved to a system hardly used by anyone and life is so much better. Get to play with interesting technology and no one minds because there is now risk of annoying a our users…

This feels so true! I had a similar experience.. spent 3 years working for big US companies, completely focused on whatever trend would impress investors the most with no one giving any thought to what might actually be _useful_ for people who, you know, actually give us money.

Now I work for a small company doing very niche work and I don't think I could love my work more. I mean people do use our software, but there's no VC funding so no pretense of needing to hop on the latest bandwagon. It's just so much better.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#316

Post by dkersten »

bigiain wrote: post #248
blauditore wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line of were AI starts is not well-defined. If you think about it, virtually all software can be considered AI if you put expectations low enough. From the other end, one could argue that once you understand the inner workings of a piece of AI, it just becomes a fancy algorithm to you. In the end, everything is just a piece of software converting input to output. My experience is that people tend to consider thin…

On the other hand, actual AI is kinda cut-n-paste accessible now too. I slapped together a POC javascript tinyYolo feature detector demo last weekend (using someone else's code and pre-trained model from their github project), and joked when I showed it around that "And we can tell investors we're running AI, deep learning, and convolutional neural networks in our realtime production workflow!"... (But as we all know…

If you have someone doing a task manually, you could technically argue that you’re using an incredibly advanced neural network. Just not an artificial one.

I was recently joking that I was training a neural network with a water spray bottle (teaching the cat not to jump on the kitchen counter). And just while I type this, my little neural network came to walk over the keyboard...

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#317

Post by rglover »

abbadadda wrote: post #312
samvher wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are not bad people. Very few people are "bad" people but the way you're describing it makes it pretty clear that they're making unethical choices, and they're doing so consciously. Actions speak louder than words.

The sad thing is, what are they going to do? Change it? Leave? Let's pretend each of these individuals are making $2M a year. They'll just be replaced with someone else that'll take the humongous paychecks. They could take a moral stand and leave, and I think continuing to work in that environment would be hard, but I don't fault the individual to the point I'd consider them a "bad person." Their complicity in these…

If they're making that kind of money, they can not only afford to leave, but have plenty of time to figure out what to do afterwards. Unless, of course, their current lifestyle is beyond their means (one would hope not in that situation).

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#318

Post by capableweb »

MattGaiser wrote: post #20
zwieback wrote: post #18

Failure of Agile can basically be summed up as: "customer not involved every day".

That much involvement is going to lead to customer driven architecture, which seems like another failure mode.

"Customer involved every day" doesn't necessarily mean that you let the architecture or product be designed strictly for the customers need. Point is to have as much user feedback as possible, to take into consideration (or purposefully say "we're not considering that").

To end up with a useful product in the end, it's better to err on the side of involving the user too much, than too little.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#319

Post by jpm_sd »

m0zg wrote: post #144
worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

To kind of go against the flow here: _most_ of the projects I worked on seemed to be a waste of time when I worked on them, but ended up making a lot of money many years later, years after I'd moved on. I like the green field stuff, and green field stuff looks like a waste of time most of the time. The first three versions suck ass and don't do much, but without having them you don't get to something that doesn't suc…

This is a great comment. If you're comfortable sharing any more information, I'd love to know just a bit more detail. What were the technologies or strategies that seemed useless at the time, but eventually succeeded?

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#320

Post by rightbyte »

malux85 wrote: post #181
SwiftyBug wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was porn, wasn't it?

Hahahaha I re-read my paragraph and it does sound a bit like that! I wish it was - then there might have been some engineering challenges related to scale, but sadly no, it was a mobile web app for getting small % discounts at stalls at a niche event.

Seems like a thing you acctually would want to share? Instead of copy pasting the url which is almost impossible on smart phones nowadays...
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