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

Roughly 15 years ago I worked for a large media company that was thinking about moving into the smart energy meter business.

I was late to join the team, but when I did, they'd already bought and branded thousands of meters that were boxed and ready to go in a nearby warehouse. The team had already built a number of APIs exposing controls for these meters as well as various monitoring and reporting interfaces. A UI already existed but it had issues, my job was to come in and fix that and get us ready for release.

We worked hard for a couple of months and whipped this thing into shape. Meanwhile a multi million budget was lined up for the marketing launch. Adverts where drafted, installation technicians where trained and merchandising was branded. All systems go.

It all drove towards a set in stone deadline and we busted our guts to get there... When the day arrived, there we sat. Ready. All features built, no bugs that we knew of. Ready to hit the 'go live' button. Honestly in 30 years working in the industry, that was the only time I think I've ever been in that situation.

Our product owner walks into the room and says, "erm, there's a couple of issues we need to discuss at board level. Hold tight guys I'll be back".

So we sit...

Two days later he returns, "erm, guys... the board aren't sure that this product is on brand. And they are concerned that if it fails it could be bad for reputation. So, we're not launching."

So we sat... for a month... working down our contracts whilst I taught myself Node.js

This is so painful. Kindle still after all these years cannot select a single word without a comma. So, dictionary does not work. Such simple thing could be fixed, but you did all this bullshit work instead.

Variable Discovery.

Yes that isn't a thing; its a term I came up with, and I sincerely hope no one ever has to encounter such a situation.

So, someone wrote a complex data processing pipeline, that read from some tables in a DB, processed the data in small and large ways, finally producing a bunch of variables that were passed into a downstream ML model. No documentation was produced, and the developer had exited the company.

The problem: because of some high stakes issues with said pipeline's results, we needed to (quickly) find out which final variables were drawing information from which initial DB fields. And all we had were a bunch of scattered scripts (Python and Pig I think).

For me that translated to this task: read the scripts to trace a path of successive variable definitions in terms of other variables, eventually connecting each output variable to one or more input column name. It took me 2 long days to trace these paths by manually reading the scripts. The evening sessions were particularly mind-numbing, and involved a few glasses of wine.

I'm in small and medium business. A lot of homegrown and unique processes that are just dandy. I mean it they're fine. But when faced by things like standard GAAP accounting processes, or even EDI. You can't argue with it. You can't tell walmart oh no well actually I didn't mean to send that 850. It costs you money. You can't willy nilly charge credit cards anymore. Its just life. It makes it hard for them not just in IT but also to hire new people or replace retiring ones. Only Bob knew this process.

What makes the clients we work with great and unique and what I love is the products they make or the problems they solve for customers, but they're not tech companies or banks. The ones who succeed are the ones who focus on thier core value and core skills and not random accounting process X Y or Z.