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

41–50 of 794 posts

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

#41

Post by ghaff »

TrackerFF wrote: post #37

As an analyst, I've worked on my fair share of projects that have never seen the light of day, and essentially just ended up in a black hole. A scenario like that typically goes like this: - Client orders an analysis of something. They want all corners covered, and because they'll use it as evidence/argument/pitch or whatever, you're likely working on a tight deadline. - You (and others) work tirelessly through the n…

I once spent months working on an expert witness report for a high profile tech industry trial--one of 10 or so written for "our" side. Never got used because of some things that happened in the course of the lawsuit.

It was a nice change of pace, paid well, and was able to reuse snippets of material here and there over the years, so not totally useless but never got used for its intended purpose.

Of course, I've also been on projects that were just canceled.

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

#42

Post by charles_f »

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 who was used by exactly 0 people. Then had to do all the consequent security updates and such. It took another 2y until we were finally shutting everything down. That was useless.

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

#43

Post by 999900000999 »

I developed a small bankroll/gambling simulator in Golang.

Ended up thinking I "figured out" roulette and I'm down about 2k. This isn't a lot of money for me, but I think I'm done with gambling for a while.

Ultimately just take whatever you feel like gambling, bet it on black and leave regardless of the outcome. That'll yield you better results than any system.

I'm not open sourcing the code since I don't want someone else to lose money using it.

It was really fun to learn Golang though. I also had some fun with setting up a build pipeline for the mobile app. I guess I really spent 2k to learn Golang...

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

#45

Post by maerF0x0 »

999900000999 wrote: post #43

I developed a small bankroll/gambling simulator in Golang. Ended up thinking I "figured out" roulette and I'm down about 2k. This isn't a lot of money for me, but I think I'm done with gambling for a while. Ultimately just take whatever you feel like gambling, bet it on black and leave regardless of the outcome. That'll yield you better results than any system. I'm not open sourcing the code since I don't want someon…

Unless you're calculating your actuals vs expected variance you don't know if you're right or just unlucky.

I've known pro poker players who were down $80k and new from their hands they were just unlucky and to keep going. Eventually made more as a player than many FAANG SWEs do.

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

#46

Post by whinvik »

I worked at a place for a few months where they had this very complicated K8s, Argo Workflows architecture for processing some Bioinformatics data. Felt cool when I joined, but it clearly was way over-engineered.

I started with a proposal on how to simplify it and went about developing a POC. However, a couple of months in, I realized that the company actually had NO customers for this. And multiple engineers had worked multiple years to get this to the stage it was. I had 0 motivation to do anything after this, and left soon afterwards. I think they are still working on it!

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

#47

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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 built-in BASIC interpreter).

I pointed out that I didn't think it would be helpful, since every customer was happy with what we had, and no one was coming close to its limits. It was a small company: I took most of the customer tech support calls, so I was plugged into what they were doing.

I was told to go do it anyway, "we're not going to be held hostage by those guys."

So, I did. I picked a cool new 16-bit Hitachi (now Renesas) chip that had a nice C cross-compiler available and set off on my pet project. My design had more RAM and more storage and a much faster clock. I wrote a simple text-based serial monitor for debugging and uploading code. It was really nice.

As I predicted, however, it didn't sell a single unit. No one cared about all the stuff I added since the existing board already had far more capability than anyone needed anyway and this one, along with the necessary compiler, cost more than 5x the old one.

They showed it to customer X, who said "it's cool, but why would you think we need this?"

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

#48

Post by tstrimple »

At one point I was working for a large international ag company helping them expand their mobile offering in other countries. We had working native apps in the US that were well tested and well received by customers. So the obvious choice was to take the steps needed to internationalize that code so it could be deployed in more regions. Instead we had to run with the fully custom implementation that the other country's team had already started building. And by started building I mean they had a few Ionic pages created that didn't even have full functionality. Everyone agreed that scrapping that project and just leveraging the existing code base was the right way to go. Yet that's not what we did. We continued to build on the much worse app for months knowing it was just going to be replaced anyway. One of the most depressing roles I've been in.

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

#49

Post by wpietri »

Jtsummers wrote: post #26

> So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time like it? When this happens, look at the money. Who is paying for it, how are they paying for it, and can the money be used for other projects/programs. I've been in similar situations where work had to be done on X even though there was little work to do or no point, but there was money. Y had more value, if we could work on it. It was funded from a diffe…

Definitely look at money, but also look at social power. Humans are primates, and primates have meticulously maintained status hierarchies. Actions driven by that may not "make sense". "Sense" came way later and it's still trying to catch up.

And one general rule I love here is POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

If you can set aside the nominal purpose of the system for a bit, you can start to see a lot of the machinery underneath.

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

#50

Post by SoftTalker »

Don't stress about it. This is how this industry works. If your work isn't immediately useless, it will be soon enough when it is abandoned in favor of the next programming language or framework that is the new hotness.

Or, a new manager or exec somewhere up the chain decides to change a business process while you're still working on implementing support for the previous process. It happens all the time.

I would guess that 90% of the code I've ever written isn't used at all today, if it ever was. And that's being generous.

Post reply on HN