Apparently everything I work on because our customer success team always seems to come back immediately after something goes into production with “customers can’t use this!”.
Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
191–200 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#192i once worked for a small startup that had licensed an autocad clone [ https://www.intellicad.org/ ] and were customising it as a low-cost autocad alternative for the indian architect market. the platform itself had a bunch of bugs and performance issues, and i was hired to work on some of the more egregious ones (it was kind of fun, i learnt a lot doing it, but it was an ultimately futile task because we were never…
"these EDA firms hire scientists and mathematicians, but no one who really knows about UI design, unlike CAD companies" is going to sit with me for a while.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#193I 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…
One of the weirdest psychological insights, which many people including myself have discovered recently, is that a fake job that doesn't actually require any work can be more stressful and unpleasant than a real job.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#194I 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.
There are several projects that implement the MTG engine and are in active use. Forge and Xmage are the main ones. You could ask their developers how they avoid getting C&D'ed. It's definitely doable and your work doesn't have to be in vain.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#195I 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…
What happened to the CFO?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#196When something I work on gets cancelled or not released, I try to feel better about it by thinking of the learning involved. Sometimes when I've been on projects that are going nowhere I will try and find ways to learn new things. A very minor, but useful example was a project early in my career where we were told to stop work while the management re-evaluates the project. I learnt to touch-type that month, a useful skill for my whole career. That was my first year contracting, they gave us a months notice on that project and I started the next contract the next Monday, so I billed 13 months that year.
I feel for architects that see their own buildings torn down in their lifetimes and replaced. I'd find that hard to deal with.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#197I wrote a simulator for testing different strategies to "cheese" Egyptian ratscrew (aka slaps) in Ruby. https://github.com/benngarcia/egyptian-ratscrew-ruby
I really suck at the game and my buddy had ideas for different strategies that would beat someone skilled at the game. So I made a CLI tool to simulate these strategies. I haven't played the game since learning that yes, there are strategies that beat skill given a sufficiently low burn rate.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#198I 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.
Do what every other VC firm does, do it and don’t care. When the C&D comes, comply. Let users cause an uproar for you.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#199Corporate users of 3G dongles used to rack up enormous charges while roaming. They’d get hit with five-figure bills and complain to their carrier that they didn’t warn them, and often the carrier would end up swallowing the charge, even though they were rarely marking up the costs heavily. I worked on a project with a major carrier to enable companies to monitor and alert on cost overruns, and shut off devices in som…
I suppose the tool would still be useful for EU -> not EU roamers? Interestingly Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway are not part of the EU but I know my German SIM card works there with its home tariff, but Switzerland is still the holdout. EDIT: Wikipedia says Monaco, Andorra and San Marino also don't have free roaming...
Also, did this EU directive come as a surprise? AFAIK they move at glacial pace and carriers should've seen it coming...
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#200Built a beautiful experience focused on serving a completely underserved community.
Won a patent for UX that solved a dicey problem which hadn't been addressed until that point and would impact any user under 18.
Won an accessibility award for design heuristics that hewed to the cutting edge of accessibility not just 'this website works for colorblind users'
The site was destroyed by internal politics. Assigned a URL that made it unmarketable (think... domain.com/projects/projectnamemarketplace) and flailed for 2 years before being sunsetted with nearly no users.