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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?

#131

Post by turrini »

"Revela Preço" (Price Reveal), a smartphone app for comparing prices across establishments.

In Brazil, all businesses must issue an invoice or a fiscal receipt. The latter includes purchase details and a QR code with a URL that directs the consumer to the respective state's SEFAZ (Department of Finance). This allows consumers to view their purchase receipt online and print a second copy if needed.

However, each SEFAZ operates differently, if they function at all. This hindered the app's progress, as the constant unavailability of state services led to numerous user complaints.

The project is currently on hold until the receipt consultation process is centralized within the Federal Revenue Service, similar to how invoices are handled currently.

The project's goal is to allow users to compare recent prices from those who have purchased and scanned their receipts, enabling them to create shopping lists in advance and know where they can save money.

Relying on each state's government to keep their systems operational has become the project's biggest obstacle.

I consider it "useless" because of the time spent on it and the inability to continue due to our government's inefficiency.

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

#132

Post by massysett »

shaftway wrote: post #117

Any time you feel useless, remember that it's someone's job to install turn signals into BMWs.

? I don’t get it, isn’t the person installing critical safety features in an automobile performing a valuable social function?

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

#133

Post by chrystalkey »

I work at a well known German company and I am employed a little less than half time as a working student to singlehandedly plan, manage and implement a project that is shown every now and then at technology conferences and demonstrations as one of two demonstrations. I am not able to decide anything on my own, since almost everything has to go through some superior to be bought/allowed. Despite this PR Desaster waiting to happen, no one else in the team gives any serious time to this project, but whenever the deadline of conference X comes around, I am the one being pressured to get things done. There are red flags on the project all around and I know it is not going to work since there has never even been a clear project vision from the start, and every month or so my direct supervisor comes along with a new turn, a new feature to be implemented despite it not working at all with whatever has been there before let alone as a complete concept. I have to actively un-implement certain features to make the next new thing work. Thank god I have a limited contract and I am out of there at the end of the month.

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

#135

Post by gedy »

0xBDB wrote: post #73

I was hired to implement and operate a specific product for a specific customer who paid for four years of onsite support. I do other things too, but that's my one contractually obligated responsibility and my primary one. Turns out the customer didn't read the (enormously expensive) SOW. They don't want the product, can't ingest its output, don't want to do the work necessary to implement it, and on a recent roadmap…

> for me this is an anxiety-inducing and unhappy experience.

Don't measure yourself by goofy corporate politics. It's not your fault (and ignore their political blame games). You can make the world a better place by the pay you are receiving.

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

#136

Post by Lerc »

I have so many options. Here's a top three

https://c50.fingswotidun.com/ useless but arguably art.

https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/ an ide,assembler,emulation for a fictional 8 bit computer.

https://github.com/Lerc/notanos A html/js desktop for Linux that I really should finish sometime.

These three projects have a combined user base in single digits. Mostly just me.

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

#138

Post by shaftway »

massysett wrote: post #132
shaftway wrote: post #117

Any time you feel useless, remember that it's someone's job to install turn signals into BMWs.

? I don’t get it, isn’t the person installing critical safety features in an automobile performing a valuable social function?

The joke is that BMW drivers don't use them.

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

#140

Post by worik »

For a very large software and hardware company's local office in NZ in 2001

What they asked for: Refreshing their suit of unit tests, 10,000 of them, that had gone stale (that applied to their widely used C++ telephony library)

Budget NZ$1,000,000

(Don't ask what, why, really?)

I joined half way through

Half the budget spent, nothing to show, mission mysteriously changed to producing a deep packet inspection tool. (What happened to the unit tests you ask? Be quiet! Take the money)

My job was to reach deep into their system and bring the data to the surface, roughly speaking

Thing is nobody that worked on the library wanted, needed, or asked for any aspect of what were doing

The design for it was written on a whiteboard by the project lead before I joined

Then the whiteboard was cleaned.

So the design was in one man's head

That man, the project lead, quit 3 weeks before delivery

On handover day I was a bit afraid, I had taken care to keep good records of my obeying (increasingly unhinged) instructions, so I was confident I could not be blamed (I was younger and naive-not part of the story)

But I fully expected an unpleasant "you did what with our money? What were you thinking?" type of unpleasant meeting

Instead the corporate types sat around a table gushing how wonderful everything was, what a brilliant job we'd all done...

I was stunned. I understand now, I learnt that day, that it was in no-one's interest to acknowledge the waste of a million bucks

Coming from academia, as I was more or less, this was a valuable lesson.

But utterly worthless software for a million dollars

I still use some of the furniture I bought with the money....

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