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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?

#411

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #168
psnehanshu wrote: post #95

Worked for a client via freelancing. Built 3 projects, all failed. He likes to follow the trends, first SaaS, then crypto/blockchain, and now AI. He apparently raises money, pays himself and builds bullshit projects. That's it. But while doing so, he does everything to look like a legit startup. Ngl, he was my first major client with whom I gained a lot of experience, but it doesn't change the fact that he is a hype…

Being a parasite is a very effective survival strategy.

Now you've got me thinking about 'Parasite as a Service'.

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

#412

Post by thefourthchime »

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…

This is a joke right?

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

#413

Post by valicord »

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…

Is "guage" some sort of joke that I don't get or just a misspelling?

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

#414

Post by epr »

89vision wrote: post #147
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…

> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.

> Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.

Depends on the type of sales. A pretty good indicator is how many times a customer makes a purchase from the same salesperson. If it's just one purchase (like ERP consulting) it could be grifty/etc like in this case. If they're buying from the same guy for years, there's often very different types of salespeople. I used to think all salespeople fit the sketchy used car salesman type, but after working with great salespeople I know better. This is a big blind spot for us techical/engineering types.

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

#415

Post by rdl »

Worse than useless -- net negative -- everything related to Iraq/Afghanistan. I didn't go over there because I thought it was a good idea (nation building in either place is dumb, and any conflict at all in Iraq was dumb), and while individual projects sometimes made things locally better (like, speeding up network connectivity on a specific base), it was overall a dumb project which made things worse because it was done. Got paid pretty well, met interesting people, learned a lot, did stuff I'd never have gotten a chance to do otherwise, but yeah, net-negative.

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

#416

Post by bombcar »

ramses0 wrote: post #87
tetha wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is indeed something my opinion shifted in the last 2 years. Some of my superiors hate it, but they are kinda getting it after some patience. The thing is: Slowly deprecating a service doesn't work. At least on my patience level, which is measured in years. I don't have decade level patience available. If you announce that a service is being decommissioned, the good teams leave across some time. This time can be…

"Change Adoption Curve" - search for some images. I talked with a few infra-ish people at Facebook once upon a time, and they described effectively a "Service Assassination Team". ImageResizer1.0, ImageResizer9000, they were an actual funded team to hunt down and destroy (and presumably help migrate) people using ImageResizer1.0 (or whatever). It seemed that was a very forward-thinking way of looking at things to pre…

It’s worse when you’re maintaining and entire system to generate one page in one report that is attached to the end of a board document once a year.

If the report stayed identical for ten years it’s likely nobody would notice or care.

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

#417

Post by XCSme »

It's about the journey, not the destination.

Many times I worked on implementing fixes/performance improvements, spent many hours finding very complex solutions, implementing them, debugging them, testing, improving, etc., only for them to become obsolete immediately after release just because browsers released a new version/API that was 2x better out of the box.

It happens a lot in software development, and I got used to it. I know that everything I develop is ephemeral. It could be used for many years, only a few days or maybe never released.

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

#418

Post by fnordpiglet »

dns_snek wrote: post #120
fnordpiglet wrote: post #61

I’m a programmer. All my work is ultimately, at best, useless. That’s one of the most important lessons any good programmer learns at some point. We aren’t building monuments in software, everything we do is disposable and will eventually be someone else’s curse in the future.

Our work products are disposable, but there's still a difference in what our projects do over the course of their life. They could be a net positive, neutral, or harmful to society, or they might just be dead on arrival and never see the light of day after months of work.

All software is DOA, its replacement just hasn’t been built yet.

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

#419

Post by XCSme »

api wrote: post #312
sllewe wrote: post #234

This 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.

The "cloud" is just overpriced VPSs....

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

#420

Post by bombcar »

drekipus wrote: post #330
tomdell wrote: post #293

I spent the past two and a half years building prototype features for a large internal application. One month ago, the CFO decided that as a part of organizational restructuring, the company will no longer invest in the application. New development on it is ending, and the entire application may potentially be deprecated at some point in the future in favor of cheap dashboards. I am being moved to the team that build…

Prototypes mean nothing. I've tried to explain prototypes, draft/paper versions. People just nod and wonder why they can't use it yet. They live in their bubble and you live in yours To be honest if you made 10 prototypes it just looks like you can't finish anything. Not that you're a genius problem solver. Make something that barely works and then hand it over to them and don't look back. Ship it.

The only prototypes are extremely personal. Once you show it to anyone else, it’s production.
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