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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?

#601

Post by angarg12 »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #173
angarg12 wrote: post #111

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 think this was a folly by our director. About a year after I left I learnt that he had "left to pursue other opportunities", which is corporate speak for "he got canned".

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

#602

Post by angarg12 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #380
bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was an internal tool, so no use in fluffy marketing.

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

#603

Post by joshstrange »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #261
2600guy wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During my tenure in college, had a professor that would write 10s or 100s of line of code to do things that could literally be done in one or two. Pointed this out to him a couple of times, not that I had been a dev for 15 years at this point. Everytime he squashed anything I said. Comes to end of semester project. Within 24 hours of him handing it out, myself and team handed in final solution, which absolutely worke…

I tried to place out of an intro-to-programming course in a back-to-school bout of scholastic achievement. I wasn't allowed to test out of it despite the coursewor being rote and that anyone with 2 seconds looking at my CV could see I did not need it. Anyway - they released the assignments on day 1. I turned them in on day 2. I still had to go to class. Stupid. My "filesystems and database design" class was basically…

I took a database design class in college. I had been using MySQL for years at this point (by no means an expert, but databases weren’t foreign to me).

In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries right (don’t get me started on programming/writing queries on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn’t put a semicolon at the end of my query. Something I had never done in any database tool, never done in my code, and only done 1-2 times on the CLI if that.

IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places. Teaching things 10+ years out of date by people who have a chip on this shoulder towards anything new. I had an EE professor who literally did not go a single class without find some way to denigrate web developers and “not real developers”. Fun times.

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

#606

Post by joshstrange »

happyweasel wrote: post #93
leiradel wrote: post #66

I was a new hire at a game development company. My first task was to optimize a function that was consuming more cycles than all the other ones. The function was responsible for dispatching Objective-C++ method calls. After a quick debug session, the problem was clear: the methods to call was being searched using a linear search. I changed the search to use a hashtable and the function disappeared from the list of mo…

I hope you ran away from that company. Your change was too disruptive, because it made other people look stupid, like they didn't grok basic data structures. I think everyone overlooks obvious solutions to everyday problems every now and then, but the way they reacted speaks volumes...

I actually think it’s worse.

Even insecure people will take better code in most circumstances. Maybe after adding their own touches to it so it doesn’t seem like you got it right or came up with a good solution on your own.

It’s the ones that don’t understand the change and don’t want to admit it that are the real problem. “Too disruptive = I don’t understand this and don’t know how to support it”, if, in fact, it was a simple search->hash map change which any developer should be able to grok.

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

#607

Post by 3371 »

I was working in a a 2-3 men group, which the manager of the tram directly reports to the big boss for the company.

The so called "tech dev team" are responsible for all sorts of tasks, for example exploring new tech, prototyping, supporting product team with optimization or content production.

We had been supporting system design and development in a new Unity (game) project for half a year, things were fine, and then the project got frozen/archived/cancelled.

And the reason was simple, our big boss wanted to svalr new heights! Something just like the one he made ~20 years ago and still feeding the company. He wanted to concentrate resources on this new ambitious project of his.

So that was it, the end of a 10+ men project, we got assigned to different task then. And then again. Then again.

Sometimes we just experiented techs. Sometimes we worked on projects that is not promising at all from our view. Sometimes we took over a good project and altered it into a abomination.

As my first job in my career, I'd say it certainly harmed my passion. I really really hope I can works on something poilsitively meaningful and impactful/useful to the world or even just certain audience.

I am probably only qualified as junior go/.net developer, but if there's such opportunity please let me know.

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

#608

Post by any1 »

I once worked for a multi-national food processing automation company.

We had an internal control system based on RT_PREEMPT Linux and busybox. This system was created before buildroot and yocto became a thing. It was compatible with the company's previous control system, which ran on bare-metal 68k. I was on the team that maintained and developed this Linux based system. This all ran on hardware that was developed and manufactured in-house.

The company had also acquired many smaller companies over the years, all of which came with their own way of doing things. Most used PLC, but not always from the same vendor, some even used elaborate mechanical clockwork.

The Linux based stuff was actually pretty good for gluing all this stuff together.

At some point, a consulting company came in, and shortly after that, the management decided that the company should focus on its "core competencies". So, they hired a guy to find a replacement for all the different control systems within the company: One system to rule them all. It was to replace all the software and the hardware.

We told them, that they should rather focus on creating and documenting common interfaces; replacing everything was very clearly an impossible task. They ignored this advice, entered a contract with a single PLC company and deprecated the system that I was working on along with everything else.

A few years later, they fired that guy they hired and the CTO, but in the meantime, we all kept working on the "deprecated" systems while the replacement was "just around the corner".

Anyway, whether they were going to proceed or not didn't really matter to me. It's all about the journey, not the destination. You can keep learning whether you're doing something useful or not. You can still craft software to the best of your abilities and take pride in the art. In fact, don't think of yourself as a software engineer. Think of yourself as a software artist!

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

#610

Post by tmountain »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #205

I worked on a six-month contract project for a large US retailer; the fact that everybody else I worked with was laid off the second week probably should have told me something was wrong, but they kept paying me so I kept showing up. Anyway, the only task they ever gave me was to build Cisco router ACLs to match existing traffic in the stores; they needed to implement access control but wanted to make sure they weren…

If this was your main gig, congratulations on getting a big chunk of your life back to do whatever you wanted. I really enjoyed reading your story. It reminds me a little of “the story of Mac”.

https://wm-help.net/lib/b/book/2895812152/59

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