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Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
271–280 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#272I once worked on adding a feature to a radar processor. After a number of months and getting it working, it was cancelled. At least the checks didn't bounce.
Was this anything like other radar projects I've heard of? Did it working have unexpected but significant national security implications with the whole thing needing to be urgently reframed or "important" people would be at risk of looking bad...
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#273I worked on a tool to digitize the German land registry, only to later get notified that they already had such a tool, so my work was completely useless. Worked on that for about 8 months, at least I got a bit of payment because I did it on the job. Currently the digitization of the German land registry is done in PDF format, which is of course horrible and my taxes are right now paying for people manually copying and pasting text from PDF documents.
I was employed as a simple office clerk (I had failed to start my own startup and needed any job to get some money at the time) and was told to do the same as everyone else, copying text from the PDF, rewriting the text according to legal guidelines and pasting it into an ArcGIS-based software. Meanwhile the ArcGIS-based software I was supposed to paste into crashed every 30 minutes. So the only way I saw to actually do my job was to write a digitization tool for the PDF documents. Since I had internal access to government documents (which aren't publicly available to anyone of course) I saw it as a way to build my portfolio and put the project on my resume to find a better job afterwards (which I did). I had a good manager who allowed me sudo access (my state used Linux, yay!), so I got to work.
After about 6 months I had a full GUI tool written and digitized about 100 PDF files. The software can digitize from PDF to JSON, then ran a python.wasm VM over the digitized JSON in order to rewrite the texts according to the (constantly changing) legal guidelines. Then I also "hacked" the ArcGIS-based software with a HTTP middleman logging server and found out that it was just submitting XML requests to an endpoint, so I wrote a tool to batch upload the JSON documents directly into the database instead of having to launch ArcGIS. In the end I also wrote a management server that used libgit2 to create diffs between legal document (i.e. creating Grundbuchänderungsmitteilungen via git diff), I am very proud of this because it's cool, although the chance of ever getting official approval was almost zero (but hey I thought it was cool).
I was hoping I could somehow sell my tool and support for it to the government, since the project of land registry digitization has currently taken over 20 years[1] and it's still not finished. Apparently the problem is that some bureaucrats want to make the absolute perfect data model and only release the software once the data model is perfect (which is basically never going to happen). My approach of making an extensible JSON-based model for now to just translate the PDFs - and then adapting it for use-cases later was rejected because, well, I am not a multi-million dollar company and I sadly failed to impress the government with my skills. Long story short, after about 8 months of work I was given rights to my program (even though I wrote it on government payroll, technically) but it was rejected. Oh well, at least I got a nice academic article[2] avoided shooting my brain out from boredom copying and pasting text and also advanced my career somewhat.
In case anyone needs such a tool, it's licensed GPL3 over at https://grundbuch-test.eu/
[1] https://www.grundbuch.eu/nachrichten/
[2] https://geodaesie.info/zfv/zfv-archiv/zfv-147-jahrgang/zfv-2... (page 4)
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#274I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make it suck intentionally. Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird. EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
this one's crazy lol.
frankly it sounds kind of fun, but i'm sure it was not in reality.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#275Sometimes, I wonder how many of the LOC's that I have written are executed every day. I honestly don't know.
Further research is needed
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is surprising, the industry of implementing industry-standard ERP systems is pretty established. I'd have expected it to go way over time and budget (they always do) but eventually succeed. Usually success is in proportion to the company's willingness to admit they're not special and can do the same things as other companies instead of having everything bespoke.
I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on mostly manufacturing and distribution the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out o…
I worked in consulting for over a decade, and... yeah. When people migrate from one system to another, they try to make the new system work exactly the way the original system does, especially if the original system is homegrown. That lack of flexibility tends to be responsible for more than half the cost (and time span) of the migration.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#277Once I was working on a government funded small business grant trying to do something that was mathematically impossible (and literally the first example of intractability in textbooks of the field). The only goal was for the company to collect overhead.
(Queue Rick and Morty butter getting robot meme.)
What is my purpose?
To collect overhead.
Oh my god.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happened to the CFO?
Hmmm, maybe check his LinkedIn where he brags about the successful transition and ERP migration he led at that company.
That happened in my company.
The CIO left bragging about implementing itil on servicenow.
What they did was replacing RT for servicenow, and only for some ticketing queues. Nothing else, no change management, no cmdb, only an incident and non standard requests queues.
128k/ year, while RT still runs in a VM for all the other ticketing queues.
Lots of powerpoints.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome story, and a good lesson in "always get it in writing"
I used to work at Accenture back when they paid workers overtime. As engagement managers got into overage (underestimated projects, often fixed fee), they would put pressure on their workers to work overtime but not log the hours. Two law firms were already reaching out to workers ~2002 trying to form a class for a class action lawsuit. My boss came by one Friday morning and informed me i'd be onsite working all week…
I feel there is something missing in this story… what was implied by your email about cancelling your flight home the agreement to only log 40 hours? Sounds like you were just saying “affirmative”… what is the stunt he thinks you were pulling? And what is the second email about which you mention gmail and taking him off.
It was a great story until that point and I want to know what happened next, I feel I’m missing something.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#280For 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. (W…
There are multi-million dollar projects churned out and abandoned multiple times per day. Very common.
I just left a company where I was contracting with a few other people for about a year. About $1.2MM down the drain. There is no hope of spinning that product up. The owners "suspended" the project and the entire brain trust evaporated. Imagine the bank owners from the movie Mary Poppins interfacing with technologists and startup founders. Whoosh...