The shittiest project I ever worked on • Hacker News Board

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#11

Post by nekopa » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 3:58 AM UTC

I never cease to be amazed that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you removed the dates from this story, you'd be hard pressed to fix when this happened.

(Except the static HTML idea is a bit of a give away, no web developer would ever dare suggest a static page in our brave new world of Web X.0)

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#12

Post by redact207 » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 4:02 AM UTC

Although it's a fun read, it's a classic example of diving into coding without giving a project it's due diligence. There's nothing that's derailed my projects more consistently when I started out as not understanding the user's needs. They'll never tell you what they want, only what they don't want after you deliver something.

I think that's the key difference to an experienced dev/BA. One who can actually sit with the stakeholders and build the system on paper and go through each of the problems as the diagrams connect. What you end up with is the stated requirements (tip) and the unstated assumptions (iceberg).

These types of projects are easily spotted as they're often called "quick" or "easy", which in layman's means no one's really thought about it yet.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#13

Post by ams6110 » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 4:03 AM UTC

nekopa wrote: post #11

I never cease to be amazed that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you removed the dates from this story, you'd be hard pressed to fix when this happened. (Except the static HTML idea is a bit of a give away, no web developer would ever dare suggest a static page in our brave new world of Web X.0)

If a static page is the right answer, why would you not say so? Scales effortlessly for one thing.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#14

Post by ctdonath » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 4:05 AM UTC

mjd wrote: post #2

tl;dr

tl;dr - A very long, difficult, and complex calculation multiplied by zero is zero. Or in this case, a very long, difficult, and complex database manipulation culminated in an invariant "Call 1-800-555-5555".

Somehow reminds me of a co-worker wandering into my cube with a dazed look, mumbling "I just ran an 8-hour database job with the wrong data...I just wasted $64,000...".

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#15

Post by dsugarman » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 4:09 AM UTC

I'm sure this is the very tough first lesson any new consultant with limited experience would learn. The summary is that the specs are incredibly important, they should be expensive to produce and they should protect you and your client.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#16

Post by the_cat_kittles » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 4:13 AM UTC

The title reminds me of the shittiest software job/project I ever worked on- short and sweet: Got hired off craigslist. It was all php. Their main competitor was "the spreadsheet". Worked directly next to a cold caller that repeated the same phrase over and over again, fake laugh and all. They were all from the same church group and tried to convert me multiple times. Paid minimum wage.

In addition to being funny in retrospect, it was a good lesson to me to learn that no matter how shitty your current situation, you can always improve it.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#17

Post by kabisote » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 4:14 AM UTC

> These days I would handle this easily; after the first or second iteration I would explain the situation: I had based my estimate on certain expectations of how much work would be required; I had not expected to clean up dirty data in eight different formats; they had the choice of delivering clean data in the same format as before, renegotiating the fee, or finding someone else to do the project.

Great advice for dealing with issues we did not consider in our estimate.

Had he charged hourly instead of a fixed price, would this project have been less shitty?

Edit: Fixed grammar. Thanks b0z0. :)

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#18

Post by danso » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 4:17 AM UTC

The punch line here is great, but even if the specs necessitated something more than a static page, then it'd still be a hard job.

If the most critical part of a data heavy project is speccing it out, I'd say the next most important part is the data munging process...and sadly, both of these things are the most overlooked.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#19

Post by thekingshorses » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 4:19 AM UTC

nekopa wrote: post #11

I never cease to be amazed that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you removed the dates from this story, you'd be hard pressed to fix when this happened. (Except the static HTML idea is a bit of a give away, no web developer would ever dare suggest a static page in our brave new world of Web X.0)

Just say we will load data(phone number) using AJAX in JSON format and everyone will be happy.

Page is static. JSON is a static file with a phone number. And use jQuery to load the JSON file.

Re: The shittiest project I ever worked on

#20

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 25, 2013, 4:19 AM UTC

kabisote wrote: post #17

> These days I would handle this easily; after the first or second iteration I would explain the situation: I had based my estimate on certain expectations of how much work would be required; I had not expected to clean up dirty data in eight different formats; they had the choice of delivering clean data in the same format as before, renegotiating the fee, or finding someone else to do the project. Great advice for…

[deleted]