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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?

#551

Post by client4 »

TecoAndJix wrote: post #304
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…

Hershey? https://pemeco.com/a-case-study-on-hersheys-erp-implementati...

The nice thing about consulting at Hershey is that they have candy closets where you can grab what you like, it occasionally includes new demo candy. And the whole town smells like chocolate.

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

#552

Post by highwaylights »

ZiiS wrote: post #243
notatoad wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is secondary.

Which is why they are vastly better whilst in the middle of a tricky migration, especially if it is going badly, and especially especially if it is being done by the most expensive contractors.

The latter half of your sentence suggests this project may actually have been a roaring success (for the vendor).

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

#553

Post by taneq »

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.

They’re not even lying, usually. They just don’t have the expertise to tell the customer exactly what they can’t have. That’s why you have sales people.

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

#554

Post by bo1024 »

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.

> my job is to enable higher ups to do their job

Ouch, I like to think it's the other way around.

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

#555

Post by spit2wind »

d_burfoot wrote: post #193
0xBDB wrote: post #73

I was hired to implement and operate a specific product for a specific customer who paid for four years of onsite support. I do other things too, but that's my one contractually obligated responsibility and my primary one. Turns out the customer didn't read the (enormously expensive) SOW. They don't want the product, can't ingest its output, don't want to do the work necessary to implement it, and on a recent roadmap…

One of the weirdest psychological insights, which many people including myself have discovered recently, is that a fake job that doesn't actually require any work can be more stressful and unpleasant than a real job.

This reduces to a belief, which I also hold, that you have inherent worth.

It's like Bret Victor's story of Puddles. Imagine you adopt a puppy. You name him Puddles. You take puddles home and you give them a little snack and you stick puddles in the cage and you lock the door forever and never open it again. Most, although not all, would agree this is cruel.

We have a notion of what it means to live a full doggy life. Dogs have to run around. They sniff other dogs and they pee on things. That's kind of what it means to be a dog. Dogs have a set of capabilities and we recognize that a dog has to be allowed the full free expression of its entire range of capabilities in order to be a dog.

The same is true for people. Like a dog needs to hunt, people seek meaning. They wither away without it.

https://vimeo.com/115154289

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

#556

Post by tgv »

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…

Inform lawyers? They can cite this as credible doubt, or whatever the correct legal term is.

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

#557

Post by throwaway5959 »

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’m sure it worked out well for the pocketbooks of the new management.

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

#558

Post by throwaway5959 »

epolanski wrote: post #349
brightball wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I don’t see how it’s any different than Windows ME.

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

#559

Post by dkarl »

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.

We had an internal tool that was written as a quick hack by a rogue developer but then became crucial for our operations. It was starting to show some rough edges and some performance limitations, so a big project was planned to replace it, run by two fancy new hires who demanded teams of underling developers and ridiculously inflated titles before they would tackle the project. It quickly became clear that this project would not bear fruit anytime soon, so my boss asked me on the down-low to produce an unofficial stopgap replacement for the parts of the old system that weren't scaling well. However, it could never threaten to be a full replacement, because then I'd be stepping on the toes of our expensive diva hires.

Long story short, last time I heard, both the original hack and my partial replacement were still in use ten years after I left. The big project ran for almost two years without replicating a single feature of the original hack. Right up to the last, the fancy guys produced an impressive series of complaints and excuses that basically said that they were doing everything right but doing things right didn't work because the problem and the context were wrong.

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

#560

Post by yhager »

drpixie wrote: post #333
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.

Different but similar. I once wrote a trivial lotto number selector app, at the request of some colleagues. It just emitted a few unique random numbers. Silly but why not. They hated it. I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number. They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)

That's not a useless project! It's a silly piece of code, but it gave joy to people, so I would say much more useful than most stories in this thread.

Back in the nineties my dad had the notion that if you make the computer select numbers at random many times, and you run statistics on the results you gain some "legitimacy" to these selections. So he asked me to write a "lotto number selector program", but it needed to run for a few hours and select many numbers and then output the ones that were selected the most or some such. Maybe it was more sophisticated, but I can't really remember the details. I guess I could just add a delay instead of actually selecting the numbers, but I wouldn't lie to my dad :)

It was super silly, but like you said, why not, I was a teen/tween and I didn't mind playing around with silly software.

He actually used it and actually filled out the lotto numbers based on it. No, we never won the millions :)

Also - I just visited a casino in Spokane, WA for the first time ever. Isn't that what all the machines there are doing? A random number emitter thingy with random delays, animation, music and flashing lights?

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