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

This is the right attitude. Unless you own the business, you have no moral responsibility to ensure the projects you work on have a purpose. You can, of course, optionally choose to not work on projects you believe have a bad or evil purpose. I've quit jobs where I though the project was evil.

You're writing the code, or producing the documentation, managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your role is, and in exchange your company is paying you money. That's the bottom line. If you think it's a useless project, then you should be even doubly grateful that a company exists that will pay you your (presumably good) salary to create something useless! I worked on a totally useless project in the past, a lot like some of the comments here describe, and I went into work every day thanking the stars that my company was stupid enough to pay me to do this!

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 a month, a year but they leave. It will take longer than expected, but the good teams move and scurry and make it work. Those are the good teams, they cooperate constructively and the migrations work.

But the other teams just don't.

And there is nothing else to say about it. They don't. And you can't take it away because there's C-Level support behind those bad teams. So you can't take it away, or else high management comes around asking questions and being pushy.

To me it seems like you either invest the necessary amount of energy to maintain a service, or you invest energy to actively kill that service. There is no tolerating, there is no "low-effort maintenance". Tell the next CVE > 8 in that service it's "low effort maintenance" and kindly ask the attackers to not attack that service because it's "maintenance".

Either this is a service we offer, or we actively work on migrating things off of it.

A few years back, I worked at a startup that got a contract with a major software company.

Our job was to implement a crypto storage system for an OSS database where each user only had access to data based on their own authentication keys. Only minimal changes to the DB allowed, so we made our own PAM module to handle the authentication and key management.

We implemented a POSIX layer that intercepted file ops and backing-stored and encrypted the blocks into S3 containers. Files/blocks that got purged would automatically pull from S3.

One month into the project the major software company decided they didn’t want it. But we still had the contract and had to fulfill it for six more months.

So yeah, six months of code in the trash. But I learned a lot of S3, AWS and wrote a toy compiler with the spare time. Since nobody cared I was able to try a lot of new solutions, test out different languages and tools. Basically experimented with everything out there.

Delivered my code on the day of the deadline. Tested, worked, archived.

I appreciate how making useless stuff is fun as a hobby, and enjoying that play is important. Even crows enjoy their sleds [0], that’s how important play is.

Needing to complete a project for the sake of your continued survival/paycheck, while adhering to specific criteria, is very much the opposite experience. A study done where _people were paid to put together Lego sets_ put together less of them when they had to watch the researcher take them apart immediately afterwards, despite intrinsically enjoying Legos [1].

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnI4dhZZxQ [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...