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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?

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right attitude. Unless you own the business, you have no moral responsibility to ensure the projects you work on have a purpose. You can, of course, optionally choose to not work on projects you believe have a bad or evil purpose. I've quit jobs where I though the project was evil. You're writing the code, or producing the documentation, managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your role is,…

Lucky for you to have the privilege to protest quit from moral outrage. Not everyone is so lucky (in fact, most people aren’t).

Sure, but did the parent comment say otherwise? This feels like a combative reply.

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

#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 CTO (my boss) made it clear that we strongly felt this would not only go way over budget, but ultimately fail as a project.

Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor. After the CTO and I expressed our concerns about the scale of the project and the sheer amount of functionality involved, the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" and were more than prepared, which was music to the ears of the CFO.

Daily 2-3 hour meetings followed (for many months) to define the scope of the project. Within each meeting I sort of zoned out because it became very obvious that no only did the vendor not understand the scale of the work involved, but had started cutting corners everywhere/leaving out crucial functionality, and this was just the scoping stage, no development had even started yet.

I eventually departed the company but kept in contact with the CTO and learned that after 5 years (project was scoped for 2), the migration was abandoned costing multiple millions of dollars with nothing to show for it.

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

#125
Not a project, and a second hand story that I'm sure a lot of people can recognize.

But I knew a sysadmin at a large european educational institution whose only job it was to hit up-arrow and enter a few times a day when a server crashed.

They knew how to fix this too, they just didn't care. And nobody else had enough experience to understand.

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

#128
Last year I spent way too much time wiring up a janky contraption using a raspberry Pico wireless board and couple of optocouplers, so I could simulate a button press on a USB switch used as a KVM between my work notebook and personal PCs. So I could then call the pico board via http from a button push on an Elgato streamdeck.

While it worked, it was still a bit slower than me simply pressing a button on the little wired remote that came with the USB switch.

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

#129
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried contacting them to see if they are interested in using it to their advantage as well?

They already paid millions to develop and sell another 2 versions of this. No way they want OPs,

At best they will bully anyone who made anything to hand it over to them (for free "or else"), and then scavenge on it in case they see anything they like for future 'features'.
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