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

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

#371
I once spent six months working the hardest I've ever worked in my entire life with a mechanical engineer, two technicians, a machinist, and all of the supporting cast of procurement and scheduling to build a test fixture for a control board for a satellite.

There were four control boards per panel and four panels per satellite and a projected order of 12 satellites so were going to have over 200 boards (enough plus spares) to test and last go-around it took two days to test a single board with failures due to connector issues and I wanted to get that down to two boards per day and no failures.

It was my masterpiece. Place a board on the fixture, pull down an assembly, and six micro-D, two nano-D, MCU and FPGA programming connections, remote thermal and multimeter probes, and a canbus connection with onboard amplifier to traverse the absurdly long cable all slotted with perfect precision into the board and were routed back to a test rack via a single cable bundle. Automated test bench scripts powered on the board, took voltage measurements, programmed the devices, and ran a suite of tests automatically and then printed out a report with a signature block for me to sign at the end.

The board experienced no stress, every connector was mated with perfect force at the perfect angles, and it would cut down the amount of time needed to test the hundreds of boards we were going to build by months.

It was featured in marketing materials for my employer.

We built four of them and with all of the labor they probably cost a quarter million each but would put the program back on track as it was delayed.

Additional delays in another part of the program led to the government cancelling the entire thing and we turned over all of our tooling and prototypes to the customer who probably put my fixtures in a warehouse for fifteen years before selling them for scrap value.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of those details matter, that's still illegal and you could've gotten in trouble legally.

I'm curious; what law was being broken, exactly?

Breaking fiduciary duty would be the first that comes to my mind.

Previous user took a very huge risk. I've seen similar stuff happen, you can get sued (along whoever told you, but you need proof) just for the sake of making an example in front of the rest of the company.

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

#373

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…

Change this from ERP to POS and you've scripted 9/10ths of the pains for many quick service restaurant chains.

Story time: people are dense as hell. This one idiot put in his personal SSN to open $XX/m a year POS account. This account currently manages just over a hundred locations, and this fool's TIN has just been raking in millions for a few years all because 'I needed to get us signed up!' And what's better!? They still can't get out of the wet paper bag, because otherwise "we'll someone might start selling candy or something unapproved" > we'll isn't that's what your franchise liaisons and agreements are for?! I'm just beside myself.

I'm so hyped on this because this one 'immovable problem' prevents me from having API access to my locations accounts. Everything just hurts. /rant

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

#374
You just described the last 3 years of my life, but instead of one pipeline, it's about 20 (of various sizes)... also, completely rewrite the old one so it keeps working, while at the same time writing the new one, which will take over and make the old one obsolete the second it's released to production... maybe even before.

No one is actually doing any planning or looking to see if certain work is worth it. Just do all the things, do them all at once, because we can't be bothered to pause for an hour to ask if the juice is worth the squeeze.

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

#375

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.

Rarely are people ever that honest to you in a corporate environment.

Usually you have to spend years working away and trying to guess why everything you're told to do makes the software worse.

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

#376
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is using a host that doesn't do this not a possibility?

It seems they all do, though. Digital ocean was the same.

Any decent VPS provider (including DigitalOcean, unless they’ve changed anything) definitely doesn’t do this.

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

#377

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…

Change this from ERP to POS and you've scripted 9/10ths of the pains for many quick service restaurant chains. Story time: people are dense as hell. This one idiot put in his personal SSN to open $XX/m a year POS account. This account currently manages just over a hundred locations, and this fool's TIN has just been raking in millions for a few years all because 'I needed to get us signed up!' And what's better!? The…

I swear the only way to get an ERP or POS change to work is to start a competitor using the new solution and wait for them to acquire you.

And then live forever with two systems running side by side.

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

#378

After the first lecture of my first programming course in college, I went to the Professor Tewksbury and started to tell him about a simulator I was writing to help other students check their work. He holds up his hand to stop me speaking, says “you have an A. Don’t come to class anymore.” So, I never went to class or did any of the assigned work, instead working on the simulator in my dormroom. At the end of the ter…

It was obviously a joke you didn't get

It's actually pretty unfortunate if they heard that, didn't get confirmation, and just stopped going to class.

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

#379
post #212

I was hired to design and build a loan platform from scratch. The company that hired me was a marketing agency that build WordPress and Magento sites, not scratch built platforms. but they took the bid from a large company and hired me to build it. I came in and started developing various microservices, and asked for more developers to assist. I got freelancers in other countries who usually build WordPress themes. I…

I don’t know the context and details of course. But might the introduction of various microservices have impacted the cost / complexity of the project?

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

#380

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…

Do you think the director was truly convinced AI was a good technical solution despite the evidence? Or is it possible they were participating in an emperor-has-no-clothes situation, i.e. the CEO has mandated all teams implement AI somewhere , anywhere ?

I'm wondering if the CEO just understands their clients will buy more products if they have "AI" in the title, even if it's pointless.

Your job isn't to make good software, it's to make profitable software.

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