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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?

#511

Post by avastmick »

Slightly tangential is the work I did on a National digital identity platform. It enables personal information sharing from trusted sources (birth records, tax records, banks) and could simply enable true/false responses to queries such as “Are you over 18” instead of sadly spraying PI data everywhere to be lost or stolen.

We as a team worked super hard and were super proud of what the platform could do. We even won some awards. But due to politics and bureaucracy its capabilities were never used and today the service is a national joke and really only used to logon to government services. It is going to be replaced with something new and shiny.

Now, I look back and think why did I care so much and work so hard. Why was I so naive that it would be used as designed.

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

#512

Post by lostlogin »

callwhendone wrote: post #446
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…

>I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers. I read this and immediately became sick to my stomach. I despise working in corporate america.

> I despise working in corporate america.

America might lead the way, but corporate anything, anywhere is pretty terrible.

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

#513

Post by sirspacey »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #310

I'm dead serious here, but if you are working on something useless do anything in your power to change that. Never work on something that's for sure going to be useless. Sometimes things become useless later, or don't pan out, and that's fine. But you're dead in the water if you aren't in a position to avoid working on something you know is useless. In fact you really shouldn't be working on something that isn't the…

I’m curious what you’ve found helps you achieve that?

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

#514

Post by dxxth »

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…

I bet it was Oracle, SAP, or IBM. The hydraheaded horror of enterprise bloated licenses.

I feel this on a deep level since the ERP system at our company is in the middle of moving to one of these big vendors and so much is simply not working out, extending timelines and development cycles. Cost only goes up and ROI is pushed out beyond the horizon.

PLM is equally bad and a horror show of legacy vendors trying to sell their solutions with the promise of customizability. Again the small, more modern players in the PLM space are constantly ignored for the big legacy ones and it turns out those legacy platforms even in their latest iterations are inflexible at best or downright hellish at worst. The reason behind all of this? Service contracts and vendor lock-in are the main drivers of value for these vendors, rather than quality (and modern) engineering.

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

#515

Post by purple-leafy »

Not for work but for fun.

I made a notebook that could be saved as a bookmark. So when you run the bookmark it would reopen the notebook where you left off.

The bookmark was basically a JavaScript executable that saved data to itself and printed its own contents to the screen.

A cross device Quine without a server

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

#517

Post by thayne »

jiggawatts wrote: post #470
calvinmorrison wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've noticed that the same applies to any large inflexible platform, such as the public clouds. If you do things the "native" way in Azure or AWS, you'll be fine, just like millions of other customers. If you try and make the cloud work like your old data centre platform, then you'll have a bad time. I just watched a customer spend $2M to deploy software routers to replace the "bad" cloud-native routers. Now everythi…

The problem is it is often very expensive to adapt other components to fit the inflexible platform.

In your example, the customer may have had software that depended on the routers having some functionality that the cloud native routers didn't. Sure if they had designed for that cloud from the beginning it wouldn't be a big deal. But now, that $2M might be less than the cost of changing all their other systems to work around the limitations of the cloud native router. I've seen situations play out like that a few times.

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

#518

Post by lostlogin »

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…

> Coming from academia, as I was more or less, this was a valuable lesson.

Academia, where there is a reasonable budget but it’s completely impossible to spend is as the cycle of meetings, emails and fucking around is eternal.

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

#519

Post by [deleted] »

bombcar wrote: post #384
ewrong wrote: post #332

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 a…

Once I came to peace with realizing my job is to enable higher ups to do their job a lot of this came into perspective. Still a complete waste, but something somewhere was enabled.

[deleted]

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

#520

Post by ShamelessC »

bombcar wrote: post #405
ShamelessC wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not familiar with that meme/stereotype…

Many people merge without using turn signals, but the subset that do it where you will notice it (e.g, close to you) seem to often be in BMWs. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done a study. Would be amusing.

Sounds distinctly like a Bay Area/populated city thing.
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