621–630 of 794 posts
I've worked on two different startups that built products until our runway ended—over a year of work in both cases—and then pulled the plug before getting our first customer. Maybe that doesn't count? I've also worked on a multi-year product for a large company in Redmond that I was really proud of when building it. It doesn't matter what the product was supposed to do, just imagine it sounding kind of sexy and being…
And that ladies and gentlemen, is the most useless project I’ve worked on. Hey atleast I got paid I guess.
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 used to work for a defense contractor. There was a 3 month period where I had nothing to do. I was supposed write firmware for a piece of hardware, but the hardware was broken and wouldn’t even turn on. I was told to wait for the electrical engineers to fix it. I sat in the lab all day, for 8 hours a day, with no internet access (it was forbidden), pretending to write firmware that I couldn’t test, with no directio…
As a web developer of 17 years, I'm dumbstruck at the idea that you're making three times as much doing this as you did at a damned defense contractor. They must have been totally chumping you.
Lots of defense contractors will try and pay their fresh meat 80k so they can make more money. Government gets really touchy about hourly rates per person, but has no problem with 'fair' hourly rates for many more people to do the job one person could and should do.
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.
As long as you have been paid for that "useless" project, you should be happy about it. You learned something...plus..you can showcase that "useless" project on your profile or something to get new work.
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.
The owners of the intellectual property wrote to me and just asked that I stop using the domain name I was using (which was the name of a character) and that every cell contains a reference to them ("Tintin is copyrighted to blah blah blah"). I obliged and haven't heard of them ever since.
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.
I don't understand why anybody would commit to work that explicitly and deliberately makes other people's lives miserable. Where do you draw the line?
Did a lot of great work with good people there too. Projects that lasted for nearly a decade.