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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?

#141

Post by clbrmbr »

After the first lecture of my first programming course in college, I went to the Professor Tewksbury and started to tell him about a simulator I was writing to help other students check their work.

He holds up his hand to stop me speaking, says “you have an A. Don’t come to class anymore.”

So, I never went to class or did any of the assigned work, instead working on the simulator in my dormroom. At the end of the term I got a failing mark. I went to Tewksbury, and he had no recollection of having told me that I shouldn’t come to class. I tried explaining myself about the simulator, and showed him. He grudgingly agreed to change my mark, seeming suspicious.

Despite my attempts to work with the dept, the simulator never got used.

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

#142

Post by jiggawatts »

leiradel wrote: post #66

I was a new hire at a game development company. My first task was to optimize a function that was consuming more cycles than all the other ones. The function was responsible for dispatching Objective-C++ method calls. After a quick debug session, the problem was clear: the methods to call was being searched using a linear search. I changed the search to use a hashtable and the function disappeared from the list of mo…

Oh wow, I had a virtually identical experience.

I was a junior programmer helping out with a Java applet game that ran in the browser. It had performance issues, which I narrowed down to a “ticker tape” text animation. The position of the text in pixels was being updated by a background thread, and that thread would leak each time when the user switched screens. If you clicked around enough there would be hundreds of threads all updating the same shared variable.

I replaced a thousand lines of that nonsense with a single line of code:

    return getTicks() * velocity % tickerWidth;
It looked identical except that now there weren’t any threads used and the animation was silky smooth.

I got in trouble for “making a mess”. The developer responsible for the previous code had been busy (for weeks!) “fixing” this code and couldn’t merge his change. So it got reverted and they spent another month tuning the threaded code for better performance.

I waited until they got distracted and gave up, then re-merged my one-liner. They were convinced they had “fixed it” and never looked at that code again.

The responsible coder got a pat on the back for his hard work and I got a disciplinary meeting to discuss my “behaviour”.

This was at a startup that burned through ten million dollars and then was shuttered because the software was basically garbage and couldn’t be sold to anyone.

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

#143

Post by gedy »

Put on a instant meeting product that was "top priority". 4 months of good work with an understaffed team, come to find out they had another team in another office doing same thing, who knew about us, but not us them... We were naively doing demos while management knew this was throwaway.

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

#144

Post by throwaway_haha »

The most useless thing I worked on was as a working student. The whole org was developing on one specific product (around 200 people) for around 4 years. Our company did a strategic acquisition and the acquired company made the same kind of product our org was doing. Their product was already in use, so they disassembled our org overnight and moved the affected teams to different projects.

The software architect of my team was heartbroken because of this. He was fully committed and it was exactly his dream to work on such a product. The last 4 years he was working his ass off and everything went to waste. I still feel bad for him.

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

#147

Post by 89vision »

LaserDiscMan wrote: post #124

I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. It was the engine of the entire company, everything passed through it. The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat. When new management took charge, an initiative was started to replace the system with an industry standard solution. Both myself and the…

> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale"

Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.

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

#148

Post by eddyfromtheblok »

matrix_overload wrote: post #97

TL is lining you up for PIP/termination. The other guy on the team is likely his buddy. Come review time, you will be shown as an IC that struggles to deliver, and the other guy will get all the credit. Been there, seen that. Start looking for other teams internally ASAP.

I've been the other guy in this scenario before.. because it's a deprecated tool, this is a low risk way to demonstrate some reliability improvements, and a way for the TL to 'scratch the itch' of reducing risk. The other guy's improvements will be built into the new tool.

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

#149

Post by clbrmbr »

ragnese wrote: post #118
windowshopping wrote: post #90

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.

Off topic, but I recently looked in to playing MtG again because my son expressed interest. But, I was a bit taken aback by how different the environment is. I last played when they still had numbered "base sets", e.g., "9th Edition", and then rotating "blocks" of three smaller-but-more-advanced sets. I was assuming I would go in and buy a couple of starter decks from the most recent numbered "edition" to start teach…

I’ve been playing with my son, but using my shoebox full of old cards, many with an “IV” logo so must have been around 4e that I was playing back in the day.

The game is complex, but a good intellectual challenge for a bright 6yo reader.

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

#150

Post by kej »

windowshopping wrote: post #90

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.

Just brainstorming, but would it be possible to pull out the MTG-specific portions and make it just an online card game framework where people can make their own cards and rules? If people choose to use it to copy MTG that's on them (see Tabletop Simulator, for example) but they might also use it to create their own new games.
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