591–600 of 794 posts
One of the projects I've worked on involved the installation (thankfully not by my team) of a very expensive, over-engineered rock-fall catch-fence. At the top of a ridge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's inevitable that Sales will put Product in a bad spot because they're too good at selling their own innocence.
I was a top 0.1% salesperson nationwide in car sales. I read a bunch of lean startup stuff, learned to make a minimum viable product, and then started selling to companies with 20-80 employees. I'm likable and good at selling, so I got 34 companies using this garbage I made. It's the worst nightmare ever to keep people motivated to use it, keep fixing things I made as a rookie developer, keep adding or saying no to f…
This was back when:
- the internet was new and exciting, rather than just part of the background of our lives
- people used video tape recorders
- "multimedia" was a field of its own, and people made a fuss about it
I got a contract to write a program in Macromedia Director (which was what ruled the multimedia roost before an upstart program called "Flash" came along) which would take a number of still pictures and emit them as a short Quicktime movie, with each picture only on screen for a couple of frames. Definitely not the hardest bit of work I've ever done.
What was it for? Someone had had the idea that the best way of getting real estate ads in front of people was to make a 15 or 20 second movie consisting of dozens of static real estate ads, which would be broadcast on TV at the end of... what? Some news or current affairs show I think. Potential homebuyers would tape this on their VCRs and the go through it frame by frame, carefully reading each ad.
As you can imagine, this was before people had much bandwidth, and long before real estate moved online.
By some miracle this actually got aired a couple of times before the idea sunk into oblivion.
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…
I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option. I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle. I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
Off topic, but I recently looked in to playing MtG again because my son expressed interest. But, I was a bit taken aback by how different the environment is. I last played when they still had numbered "base sets", e.g., "9th Edition", and then rotating "blocks" of three smaller-but-more-advanced sets. I was assuming I would go in and buy a couple of starter decks from the most recent numbered "edition" to start teach…
Here is a small blogpost by WotC: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/revitalizing...
What I didn't know at the time, and came only to realize much later, is that these enterprise software vendors and integrators tend to put their A-team onto winning new business, holding back some hapless goons for the actual implementation if and when that comes around.
I was managing a team of BI analysts, data scientists and assorted "KPI reporting" heads. First thing the implementation team does is look for a list of all current reports and their data sources. OK, nothing odd there, but roll forward about four months and there's a weekly status update meeting where the vendor casually mentions that the data warehouse will be locked down to producing exact facsimiles of the current reporting, with no other access allowed for running other queries. Future reports or changes would have to be routed through the vendor for development.
This of course kicked off a major sh!tshow, where I had to go to the CEO and tell him that unless he wanted to be signing cheques to the vendor forever more, we'd better get some appropriate permissions on the data warehouse and BI reporting system.
After lots of difficult shouty meetings with the vendor, despite their threats to hold back support from their own work, we got access and could continue to do some work. However, the vendor argued that they'd need to place a couple of "senior support engineers" on staff to ensure smooth operations from our meddling. These guys turned out to be some fresh college graduates who didn't have English as a first language, but ended up costing the company about 150k/year each for them to sit at a desk and play minesweeper all day.
Lots of hard lessons learned, I was way too naive thinking that vendors just want to sell stuff, plus occasional support - rather than take over an entire function for cash.
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.
Where do you draw the line?
Any time you feel useless, remember that it's someone's job to install turn signals into BMWs.
BMW turn signals used to work differently until I think the mid-2010s. You would press down to turn on the left signal, it would revert back to the middle, then you would press down again to turn it off. People would turn on the signal and then accidentally turn on the opposite signal when trying to turn it off. So a lot of people stopped using them.