have formerly done gov r&d. no further elaboration needed
Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
311–320 of 794 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#312This was a publicly traded SaaS company. After acquisition - we were handed down the order to migrate to AWS. This was after (in the mess of the merger) the colo contracts were basically ignored and not renewed. Once someone within the company realized the issue, it was the 11th hour. After many, many attempts to discuss our (Operations team) concerns, we abandoned our protests. It was clear the new CTO wouldn't cave…
Versions of this story are pretty common out there. People migrate to cloud because The Cloud and think they're going to save money, get extreme sticker shock, and migrate back... if they can. Sometimes they get locked in and are sort of stuck.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"We hate everything about our system, get us a new one" "We want the new system to work exactly like our old one" It's probably not worth the money...
I haven't pieced those together but of course they go hand in hand.
I had one guy want me to recreate Microsoft word, worts and all, because his current Word wasn't doing it for him
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#314We were building SD WAN. There was a brilliant evangelist spinning the story of how we were going to change the world with our new in house product. He listed off the features it would have, and I asked if our customers requested those features. He blew right by my question without even acknowledging me. There was a feeling in the room like I was being obtuse and asking silly questions. The implication was that the smart people in the room all understood why this was going to be big, and I had better keep my mouth shut and try to keep up.
To make sure the project was successful, we contracted the actual work out to BigCorp. I pointed out they were already selling a product in this space - we would be hiring them to build their own competition. No one seemed too worried.
Lots of money, lots of time, lots of progress reports, lots of calls with enthusiastic sales people. Nothing ever resembling a functional product came out of it. When it finally got cancelled I heaved a sigh of relief.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#315My PhD thesis (ETA: TBA)
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#316Earlier 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…
But they don't try to "buck the system" just for the sake of it.
Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible.
You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#317This is old, but my most pointless project: The CEO wanted a screen in every hall that showed the company "EnGUAGEment meter". Users would have to go to the app, choose from 10 or so canned messages like "Feeling productive", "Ready to conquer the day", and other such HR speak the CEO (or rather the HR committee he put on the important business of picking the list) felt was motivational. This would update a page that…
Bill Lumbergh approves of this!
Very much so. Also Michael Scott. This was a period of my life when I wanted to like The Office, but it was just too realistic for me.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#318I 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…
I have had this job before.
You have two choices.
1. Start a side gig. Be busy at work make extra money.
2. Work on open source. Find a project you like or want to work on and do that.
PS: set up a home lab and learn to love SSH tunnels.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#319In data-driven product development, they use A/B experiments to determine if a new feature will improve some key metric in the long run and also will not impair other key metrics. Several teams may run tens of experiments at the same time. In mature products, 80%-90% of these experiments' outcomes are zero or negative and their code is wiped out to keep the codebase unclogged.
When I was working in such a company, I warned people in the interview that most likely 80% of the code they write will be thrown away. It is surprisingly hard to cope with.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
#320I spent much of 2023 writing the code for our company to implement the changes in the new version of this standards document:
https://www.frc.org.uk/library/standards-codes-policy/actuar...
As far as getting paid to write code in our industry goes, it was quite enjoyable. Most of the code was totally new and not particularly tightly coupled with the rest of the system, so the challenges were in understanding the subtleties of the requirements and coming up with a clean and performant design rather than fighting legacy code.
Touch wood, I've done a reasonable job. We got it done a couple of months before it was required and a full dry run with our entire customer base only found one pretty subtle edge case that I'd missed.
So we get to keep our license to look after billions of pounds of customers retirement savings, which is kinda important, and because I worked on this other developers got to work on stuff that actually helps our customers (which is important for our customers, and ensuring that our business retains and expands said customer base).
However, the new version of the regulations, while written with the laudable intention of providing people with more accurate and unbiased information about how much money they will have on retirement, achieve nothing of the sort. It just replaces one set of assumptions that are wrong on some edge cases, with another set of assumptions that are wrong on a different set of edge cases, in some cases arguably wrong in worse ways. Nor does it address the real weaknesses in these statements.
And across the industry, there are literally dozens of companies who had developers who spent similar amounts of time to me implementing this new standard, for no benefit of any of their customers that I can discern either.