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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?

#681

Post by jknutson »

danielscrubs wrote: post #541
baw-bag wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my god, it isn't the same product but I was the user of a similar thing at an old job I had for 2 years only it was a slider from 1-10. I always chose 1 no matter how productive, happy or driven I felt. I remember that HR called me in because of this and in a round-about way said I can't just keep doing that as it was bringing the whole purpose of the system down. If I didn't want to interact with the system then…

My boss said everything bellow 9 is a failure with a hard look. Our metrics happiness level rose to 9 the very next day. Boss got promoted because he was creating such happy teams. Sometimes I wish I didn’t live in a Dilbert strip.

I laughed out loud in my office reading the dilbert strip line. Thanks for the giggle, that’s a new one for me lol

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

#682

Post by jknutson »

mkl wrote: post #441
valicord wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "guage" some sort of joke that I don't get or just a misspelling?

It's a misspelling of "gauge", judging by "on a car dashboard style guage". Was pretty confused up to that point.

Maybe it’s some sort of in joke for the company. At least, that’s how I took it— alongside it being an obvious reference to a speedometer. My intuition was that maybe the company’s name was “gauge”, or better yet the CEO’s name was gauge. I really hope it was the latter. Makes me think of Hooli from Silicon Valley for some reason lol

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

#683

Post by laeri »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #445
zilti wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you really leave us hanging here with so little information

Sadly, I really can’t be more specific than that. Much as I disagreed with their decision, it was theirs to make, and I respected it. It probably would not have been a money-maker (which was a big reason for the cancellation), and it cost a lot to make. Those top people don’t come cheap. I am not doing the same kind of thing, these days, but I have yet to see any software, from anyone, to this day, that can do what i…

Not sure what is hindering you talking about it. You seem to be proud of it.

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

#684

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

epolanski wrote: post #367
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #233

Define "Useless." My team worked on a project for about 18 months. I won't go into detail about what it was, but it was (and still is) badly-needed. We worked with the top interaction and graphic design folks in the world for the aesthetics and interaction. We had many meetings, flying the whole team to San Francisco, several times a year. When the project was in its final testing, the company got cold feet, and canc…

Quite impressed by your depth and experience in the sector. You making such a bold statement makes me even more curious.

I'm not so impressed by it. I routinely worked with folks that made me look like a piker.

Curiosity is the spice of life. Enjoy!

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

#685

Post by morpheos137 »

talldatethrow wrote: post #527
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #154

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 is hilarious. Can you describe the product or what it does? Is it something to do with payroll, benefits, or HR?

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

#686

Post by some_guy_in_ca »

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've spent my entire 30 career in ERP Consulting (PeopleSoft), working with Payroll, Accounting, and Student management systems.

I have a current client that is a mirror of this exactly. They had one new executive go to a sales demo, and the sales guy told him it would be "live" in a few months, and he believed it. It was so laughable and downright embarrassing for the client. In this case, I know it is at least a 3-year project if you have competent team members and vendors. It also depends on how you define "success" and how many business processes you are willing to break. However, these can stretch into 5 year projects when you are working with mission critical systems running accounting and payroll. In those cases, you cannot move fast and break things.

Most organizations don't have competent teams, and the vendors are often made up of low-skilled offshore workers, which makes nuanced, complex projects very complicated. The sales side will promise the world then the implementation team is low skilled and underdelivers.

I have seen this with several other clients, replacing pieces of PeopleSoft modules with different applications. Sometimes they come back and sometimes they just suffer through it and then find a third option after the new system fails to deliver.

Most ERP systems are just CRUD systems. So, you end up with a working CRUD system being replaced by a new CRUD system. The old system had its strengths and weaknesses. The new system will solve some problems and break others.

You spend 3-5 years replacing a system only to end up in the same place you were before: A CRUD system. This is maddening unless you are the new vendor and getting enriched.

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

#687

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

laeri wrote: post #683
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I really can’t be more specific than that. Much as I disagreed with their decision, it was theirs to make, and I respected it. It probably would not have been a money-maker (which was a big reason for the cancellation), and it cost a lot to make. Those top people don’t come cheap. I am not doing the same kind of thing, these days, but I have yet to see any software, from anyone, to this day, that can do what i…

Not sure what is hindering you talking about it. You seem to be proud of it.

Um ... confidentiality? Maybe it's become passé, these days, but I subscribe to it.

I talk my life and experience. I’m old, and have been at this game for a while, so I’ve seen a fair bit. I don't fluff, brag, or humblebrag. I don't pretend to be what I'm not, and I can back up what I say. Sometimes, I don't think it's necessary or proper to do so (like in this case), and what I claimed was not so outrageous, when you consider that the graphic design agency was Pentagram, and the Interaction design agency was DDO. They did most of the difficult work, and did a great job of it.

Assume whatever you want as my motivation. I don't particularly care. It's a free country.

You seem to know me, better than I know myself, and I guess you're ... um ... proud of that?

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

#689

Post by Tainnor »

At least two times in my career I've (almost solo) worked on pet projects of a CTO or similar that were assigned almost no other resources and weren't really aligned with other stakeholders.

It was usually fun while it lasted but then inevitably it would just be scrapped.

Also, one time my team hired a freelancer but in order to justify him to upper management we had to invent some extra project to implement. It turned out to be all in vain anyway, since the whole team was let go one year later.

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

#690

Post by duderific »

delecti wrote: post #633
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this exists so that people who use their kindle will pay trn bucks to turn it off.

It's possible things have changed, but at least while I still worked there, virtually nobody paid to turn the ads off. It was a vanishingly tiny number. Though fun fact, some execs did the math before making the smart cover, and figured they'd make more money from that, than they lost from people not being able to see and interact with ads.

I just ignore it, I don't know why anyone would pay to turn it off. It goes away as soon as you start reading the book.
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