341–350 of 794 posts
Define "Useless." My team worked on a project for about 18 months. I won't go into detail about what it was, but it was (and still is) badly-needed. We worked with the top interaction and graphic design folks in the world for the aesthetics and interaction. We had many meetings, flying the whole team to San Francisco, several times a year. When the project was in its final testing, the company got cold feet, and canc…
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.
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…
There was a 3 month period where I had nothing to do.
I was supposed write firmware for a piece of hardware, but the hardware was broken and wouldn’t even turn on. I was told to wait for the electrical engineers to fix it.
I sat in the lab all day, for 8 hours a day, with no internet access (it was forbidden), pretending to write firmware that I couldn’t test, with no direction on what I should be doing. There was no simulator, no tests, no guidance.
In that time, I would practice my own Leetcode problems in preparation for other jobs. All day long.
About two weeks before I left the company, I received my security clearance. That’s when I realized… they were just killing time until I had my clearance.
All of a sudden, the flood gates were opened, and I learned about a really interesting project. Not interesting enough to keep me though ;)
Six years later, I’ve 3x’d my compensation. And I love my job now (web development).
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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…
E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology, rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they end up being mediocre their whole career.
Had anyone bothered to ask me, I could have told them that their "solution", being a Windows-based software package, wouldn't run on their database servers, which ran SCO Unix. Which was quite adequately backed up with tar and cpio, and rotating off-site tape storage.
Later, the desktop support group was surprised by the delivery of a couple of pallets of Compaq laptops and desktops with Windows 3. This was before "internet" was really a thing. The desktop guys set them all up, made sure they could log in to the Novell servers, and went home. However, the main application the clerks used was on the SCO boxes, which were accessed with NCSA Telnet. The Compaq machines had Ethernet ports, but their customized Compaq Windows version didn't have TCP/IP drivers, so the next morning they were frantically putting the old computers back so people could work.
When I worked for my country's defence organisation, I was the "primary development resource" on a project to rebuild the login page for their online services portal. I was allocated to this task full time for 14 months. I got some designs from the UI people, did a real shit job of turning it into a functioning page in angular in about a month (I'm not a frontend dev, they never asked me if I even knew what angular was, the job just landed on my desk one day), copied some npm magic to make it all render out to a single HTML file that could be installed in their fancy super security authentication system. For the remaining time I just attended a few hours of meetings a week and answered a handful of emails each week, maybe 2-3hrs of work a week, while a bunch of shit went on in the background to approve and document the work (stuff I didn't have the right title to do).
I left that job three years ago, the login page for the online portal is still the one that was built in 2003.
I'm fairly sure the entire point of the massive overallocation was for $CORP I was employed by to extract more money from $GOV, at the cost of a fraction of that paying my salary.
A couple of years ago, our sister company asked us to support them (aka do the work for them) in an ML project with a vendor. We researched several in the industry and presented our choices. They rejected all of them and selected this fairly unknown one. This vendor was chosen without seeing a demo or interviewing alleged customers.
Immediately, this vendor set off red flags, but our CEO was too chicken shit to push back. (No, I know what you're thinking. Our CEO wasn't in on it. He's too chicken shit and stupid.) I naively came into the company around this time and immediately set up discussions to explain our data and its sources. They didn't care. They just wanted the data. They threw fits when we brought up that we weren't comfortable with releasing financial and confidential data. They were up in arms about security requirements. We had to fly out to their headquarters for a demo, and they only offered to show us a canned demo. They kept blaming my company at every opportunity including to the point of switching out meeting notes and documents for signature.
The running theory is that they were out of money, and were desperate for an exit strategy. They needed us to show off to potential buyers and investors. My theory was that they were only in it to sue us and get a settlement. And of course, decision makers at the sister company were in on the scam.
Finally, our parent company finally started seeing through the scam, but we still had to cover our asses and meet certain deliverables. I created an epic that basically was sending data through Kafka to the vendor. And of course, they wanted it yesterday.
I told the team, "This is all bullshit. They [the vendor] do not have the expertise to examine the data. They're not even going to look at it. Your work is going to be thrown away when this finally gets shut down. We just need to pipe data there. I don't care how messed up and dirty it is, don't bother testing."
Sure enough, a little while later, the parent company shut down the project. I gleefully killed the pipe when word came down. The kicker was that the vendor wasn't officially notified for another month.
During this time, did they ask us why the pipe was killed? Of course not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t mean to be the morality police, but that seems illegal.
It was an internal tool and the VP was the head of IT. Everything still worked, it was just painful to use. He could have pulled the plug on it at any time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may indeed do this. There is an outstanding issue I have to address that I've never quite worked up the motivation to deal with: Heroku restarts their servers once every 24 hours with only thirty seconds' warning. Since the games are in-memory, this of course kicks everyone out of whatever games they may be in the middle of. I guess the solution is to have the games be on Redis instead of in-memory? I'm a bit more…
Is using a host that doesn't do this not a possibility?