Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on? • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by mixedCase » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:00 AM UTC

LaserDiscMan wrote: post #124

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…

Damned. I'd be tempted to write down in my resume "Company would've saved N million dollars and 5 years of their time had they listened to me" were it not such a double edged sword.

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

#362

Post by veb » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:00 AM UTC

worik wrote: post #140

For 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…

Totally sounds like Spark :D

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

#363

Post by ajcp » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:00 AM UTC

snoopsnopp wrote: post #259

brightball wrote: post #228

I 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.

I don’t mean to be the morality police, but that seems illegal.

morality legality

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

#364

Post by Froedlich » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:01 AM UTC

7thaccount wrote: post #181

angarg12 wrote: post #111

Working for big tech, our Director wanted to add "ML" to one of our workflows no matter what. He identified a "problematic step" and a team of scientist spent 1 year coming up with a ML model to replace this step. I was asked to deploy this solution in production. When we tested the model (which somehow hadn't happened before) we found that the workflow was 5% quicker, but the results were more than 10% worse, and wa…

Almost assuredly he knew it was a bad idea, but had a goal of "implement machine learning" from his VP or just wanted it in his resume.

If you get assigned to something like that, own it, no matter how useless it is. It's an opportunity to bulk up your resume for free.

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

#365

Post by 8b16380d » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:02 AM UTC

datadrivenangel wrote: post #285

notatoad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, the key is to always have some sort of migration happening so every problem can be addressed by saying "this will be resolved after the new ERP is rolled out"

And you can decline to do literally any piece of work because you need to focus on the migration. Perfect scheme.

Or “it’s best to wait till the migration complete before our team needs to do anything”

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

#366

Post by Tijdreiziger » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:06 AM UTC

calvinmorrison wrote: post #261

2600guy wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During my tenure in college, had a professor that would write 10s or 100s of line of code to do things that could literally be done in one or two. Pointed this out to him a couple of times, not that I had been a dev for 15 years at this point. Everytime he squashed anything I said. Comes to end of semester project. Within 24 hours of him handing it out, myself and team handed in final solution, which absolutely worke…

I tried to place out of an intro-to-programming course in a back-to-school bout of scholastic achievement. I wasn't allowed to test out of it despite the coursewor being rote and that anyone with 2 seconds looking at my CV could see I did not need it. Anyway - they released the assignments on day 1. I turned them in on day 2. I still had to go to class. Stupid. My "filesystems and database design" class was basically…

It’s hard to say with this little information, but it sounds like you might have chosen the wrong school for your goals?

The database class at my uni was mostly relational algebra. Likewise, many other classes were mostly foundational theory (though we did have project-based applicative classes too).

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

#367

Post by epolanski » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:07 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #233

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…

Quite impressed by your depth and experience in the sector.

You making such a bold statement makes me even more curious.

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

#368

Post by bdzr » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:09 AM UTC

rossant wrote: post #224

Well, this has nothing to do with programming and goes way beyond being merely "useless"; yet it might offer some perspective on your question and perhaps help you relativise things. There's a global industry involving thousands of healthcare professionals, lawyers, judges, police officers, and child protection workers who have spent 50 years prosecuting tens of thousands of parents and caregivers for allegedly shaki…

The justice system is filled with all sorts of this stuff, sadly. Claiming they can match a shell to the gun it came out of, blood spatter, etc. My favorite example of this existing at a micro scale is when a professor claimed she could determine age, sex, and race from the footprint of a suspect.

[1] https://greensboro.com/anthropologist-testified-nationwide-g...

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

#369

Post by asdfman123 » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:09 AM UTC

My first job was working on an open source bug tracking tool that had been overextended to hell to perform business tasks: kick off automated processes, read and write from the corporate data store, etc.

I spent years fiddling with that thing. When the layoffs came and I left, they just threw the whole thing in the trash. Completely useless work.

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

#370

Post by baw-bag » Sat, Apr 06, 2024, 12:10 AM UTC

shireboy wrote: post #250

This 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…

Oh my god, it isn't the same product but I was the user of a similar thing at an old job I had for 2 years only it was a slider from 1-10. I always chose 1 no matter how productive, happy or driven I felt. I remember that HR called me in because of this and in a round-about way said I can't just keep doing that as it was bringing the whole purpose of the system down. If I didn't want to interact with the system then I should just select a higher value and a few months later, my manager said that I didn't need to use that system any more.

The funny thing is that in my current job, they use something called "Dailybot" or something integrated to google chat where you check-in and once a week, give an emoji between 1-5 about my productivity or something... Unhappy face for me.

What value is this supposed to provide? If you take part, it will be 8-9-10 regardless to "look good" and if you don't take part like me, it drags the entire team to an average of 4-5-6 which is the same as not having the system at all and yields the real outcome of average.