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

All servers are running on a K8S cluster in AWS. My monthly hosting bill is only about $1200 a month. Well worth it.

So, I once had a contract at an ad agency, which was getting into the business of making software for food-related clients. Our first customer of this sort, was a chain of cupcake stores. Their CEO had just come in from a hamburger chain, and wanted to replace their (functional, bespoke) website and factory (i.e. kitchen) management software, with an outside off-the-shelf solution. We were to make the website and the glue logic to the outside product they had chosen.

The cupcake company's CTO took paternity leave shortly after the project began.

We asked about the back-office software, which interfaced with the kitchens, on a couple of occasions, and were told not to worry about it, the third party standard solution would handle that.

So, with a week to go, the cupcake CEO finally shows the product to his regional managers. They ask, "where's the part that tells us to put make this much of this kind of frosting, and when in the day to do it? and make this much of red velvet cake, starting three hours before it's needed?"

It turns out, the third party solution was for sandwich and burger places, where you would just make the food when it was ordered. For cupcakes, it needed to combine the needs of multiple different orders, take into account how many hours it would take to make each flavor of cake and frosting, and tell the kitchen staff what to do, and when. The cupcake CEO had only ever run a burger place, he had no idea about any of this, and didn't want anybody like the CTO telling him his idea wouldn't work.

So, he asked us if we could update our glue logic to also talk to the old software, so that it would continue to run the kitchens, while the new website took the orders. We said sure, here's how much it would cost.

Oh, he said, we wanted it as part of the previous quote.

The final meeting, wherein we explained that we had done what he had asked us to, was not attended by the cupcake CEO, he sent his new CTO (the old one had quit right after his paternity leave was up). Every permanent employee of my company slipped out, and I, the contractor, was left for the last part, to explain that no, we would not be building any software not in the original quote, for free.

The entire project went into the dump. The former CTO of the cupcake company, started work for the company that had made the original, bespoke software that was still running things.

We got employed by a very rich and very eccentric retired businessman to help create an online exhibition for his collection of antique items. I won't mention what the items are, but think historically significant, extraordinarily rare, stupendously expensive.

We flew over to see him with a creative proposal for the site, got the go-ahead, and spent the next 6 months creating and building. We started to get content for the site, via his "team" (a student just out of college, nice guy but totally inexperienced in ...anything much).

As we got to the go-live date it became clear that things (as ever) were going to slip on the content side of things. The head guy was extremely meticulous, and the site contained a lot of video content - everything was shot at the highest quality, and there were maybe 300 videos to do, plus lots of photographs for each item, plus text content which needed to be researched as well.

We'd stressed all along (as we always, always do...) that content is almost always the first thing that causes bottlenecks in our line of work - we hit all our deadlines, but the content was just excruciatingly slow to extract. Nothing new for us, but we then went back to the client and suggested that rather than waiting for everything to be in place he roll out the site with all the content we had (about 25%) and basically go live - then iterate as more content arrived. In this particular context this makes perfect sense - as individual items were completed we could have published them, they could have done some PR about each one, nice "trickle content" to keep the SEO and social media gods happy.

But: the head guy was not of the "go live and iterate" mindset ...at all. We finished all the design and dev work, and a year went by. I emailed the "team" guy on a regular basis, pushing for the site to go live. Round about now it turned out that everyone on the staff was absolutely terrified of head guy - if he said jump, they all said how high, and absolutely no-one on the client side was prepared to push him at all.

Another 6 months went by, and next time I emailed a totally different person who knew nothing about the project answered the email. Turns out the entire team had been replaced - so we started from scratch, trained people up on content editing, kicked off project meetings again... and then nothing.

This started a cycle that basically went on for ...8 years :-/

We'd work on the thing for a bit, the team would change, we'd re-train, content would trickle in - rinse and repeat.

Obviously, all the energy and enthusiasm had gone by this time, the original design and build needed some serious refreshing anyway, and all the original project aims had sort of gone out the window in the intervening years.

After 9 years, we got dumped, and a new guy came on board to deliver the site. Luckily we had solid contractual stuff in place, so we billed our last 20% and walked away.

2 years later I noticed that the site had finally gone live - a complete rebuild, a complete new redesign. And, I have to say - with some slightly bitter pleasure - it's really terrible :-)

I have bumped into 2 more types of exactly head guy's mentality over the past 25 years working in my area - they all share the same mentality: incredibly bright self made people who have earned a wad of cash, but with that same sense of entitlement which makes them completely unable to take on board anything an external expert brings to the table. I can now spot them from a mile off: they may be extremely rich and on the face of it excellent people to do work for, but f** that, when this particular personal klaxon goes off I now just say no...

> That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty.

There has to be proof about that. If everything was verbal how do you prove it?

There's no way around the fact that sabotaging your company is illegal and a breach of contract.

Or refusing to use anything except Office 2003 because newer versions are too different...