How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants? • Hacker News Board

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#391

Post by cjvirtucio » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

ido wrote: post #152

fogetti wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might look good in the short term, but there are many companies and roles which require you to show the actual number of users, or the load of the service that you worked on. Also many technically challenging issues only come out under load, and actually working on challenging things are very different from reading about them. Just my 2 cents.

there are many companies and roles which require you to show the actual number of users, or the load of the service that you worked on. I got my first job as a programmer in 2001 and not once was I asked that. I'm sure they exist but I wouldn't count on that being so common as to significantly impact the OP's career prospects. Two things I've most often noticed people care about when hiring: 1. experience with the ex…

What happens when one is working on something that is neither of the two things in your last sentence?

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#392

Post by golergka » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

SwiftyBug wrote: post #169

malux85 wrote: post #159

Yes, so I put analytics in to prove it. I told the project leader that nobody wants a share button there, because of the nature of the data, nobody will share it. They disagreed strongly, suddenly the share button was super important. So I put tracking on it. A year after launch, guess what? Yep that’s right, nobody clicked the button. Not a single user. So I showed them the data and told them I was right. I told the…

That was porn, wasn't it?

Nah, there's plenty of sex-positive Twitter accounts that share a lot of porn in the most social way, to the actual living people that follow them, have conversions about it and sometime even meet up in real life.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#393

Post by malux85 » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #320

malux85 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahahaha I re-read my paragraph and it does sound a bit like that! I wish it was - then there might have been some engineering challenges related to scale, but sadly no, it was a mobile web app for getting small % discounts at stalls at a niche event.

Seems like a thing you acctually would want to share? Instead of copy pasting the url which is almost impossible on smart phones nowadays...

It was an info page similar to a terms and conditions page, nobody wants to share that.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#394

Post by elicash » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

J-dawg wrote: post #362

TedShiller wrote: post #264

I'll share a disturbing anecdote about one of the largest and most influential software companies in the world, based in the Bay Area, and I'll leave it to you to guess which one. I know of several people who work there who are ranked very highly and are paid extremely well, who have told me personally that the work they do there is terrible for the users (i.e. it's exploitative) and terrible for the internet (it int…

I think the hypocrisy of this stands out in tech more than other industries, because people have got used to the idea of tech "making the world a better place" and being a force for good. There are bright people making lots of money in other industries who would struggle to even pretend they are making the world a better place. In fact, how many jobs are there where you can get reasonably high pay and status, and sti…

All industries do this.

Finance, oil, corporate attorneys, lobbyists -- I can't think of a single profession that doesn't build a myth around their value to the world.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#395

Post by surething123 » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

I worked on a project that basically was a very simple rules engine, encoding a bunch of domain knowledge in a digestible dashboard format, which happened to use a few predictive models' output as well to drive a few of the rules. The product owner insisted that "AI" be in the name, whereas I was reluctant to put lipstick on that pig. Ultimately (as usually happens if the product owner is your boss) the "AI something something" name stuck, but the whole branding of the endeavor rubbed me the wrong way (even though the product was actually somewhat useful).

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#396

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

newaccount12345 wrote: post #273

My manager (a director) at a FAANG used to give me (and only me, justified with my strong background - though he used similar tactics on others) tasks that couldn't be solved and didn't have any business justification so he could keep me from getting promoted. The first few promotion cycles I still tried to find alternatives (X doesn't make sense, but Y would reach similar goals in a reasonable way), but the motives…

[deleted]

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#397

Post by 6510 » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

heavenlyblue wrote: post #382

6510 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was 17 I worked [production] in a sofa factory that made huge profit. They hired every highly specialized consultant available. I asked one of the consultants and some office folk for an explanation (I was paid 3 guilders or so per hours ($1.5)) To my surprise both the consultant and the office folk thought it was a fascinating question and explained elaborately how [to them] it was worth every penny to have w…

Which question?

Why they paid me roughly 1.5 USD and the consultants several thousands per hour.

My bad, I originally wrote " They hired every highly specialized consultant available for .... guilders each" but I only hear the price of one and I failed to remember if it was 5000 or 20 000 for a 2 hour chat.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#398

Post by carapace » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

I don't know if this counts. I worked briefly at a place that was making sensors for fitbit-style wearable medical devices. One thing that was really cool was a device that could measure your blood alcohol level. They were trying to miniaturize it to fit in a watch or whatever.

The investors and intended market are a staunchly Muslim oil oligarchy.

(In case it's not clear: ¿ɥǝ 'sɯǝlqoɹd ǝq ʇɥƃᴉɯ ǝɹǝɥʇ sɹǝlɐʇoʇǝǝʇ ɟo uoᴉʇɐu ɐ oʇ sɹosuǝs ǝzooq lɐuosɹǝd ɔᴉʇɐɯoʇnɐ ǝɔnpoɹʇuᴉ noʎ ɟI )

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#399

Post by simonw » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

heavenlyblue wrote: post #379

alkonaut wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Google Translate is obviously a useful product, and obviously Google will have thousands of areas where they can apply AI (enough that they'd even write frameworks for it). But 99(.99)% of us work in mundane jobs doing boring CRUD apps. My post was meant in this context. You work in a company making an intranet product for the paper tissue industry. Your manager wants v3.0 to have some AI in it. No one remembers…

Google Translate was good before the so-called "AI revolution".

Google Translate today is absolutely spectacular.

A fun game used to be "translate this phrase English to French, then translate it back again and laugh at how meaningless it's made by the round-trip". That doesn't work any more.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#400

Post by m0zg » Tue, Jun 16, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

jpm_sd wrote: post #319

m0zg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To kind of go against the flow here: _most_ of the projects I worked on seemed to be a waste of time when I worked on them, but ended up making a lot of money many years later, years after I'd moved on. I like the green field stuff, and green field stuff looks like a waste of time most of the time. The first three versions suck ass and don't do much, but without having them you don't get to something that doesn't suc…

This is a great comment. If you're comfortable sharing any more information, I'd love to know just a bit more detail. What were the technologies or strategies that seemed useless at the time, but eventually succeeded?

In the first project I worked on at MS we were entering a new, established market with multiple strong competitors, and because Microsoft at the time did not have the right tech stack to do web services, the initial tech choices were dubious at best. The first version looked great, but under the hood it sucked like you wouldn't believe. Then sales somehow sold it to some pretty large/important customers, and the team had to spend the next 2 years fixing things "under the hood". Now it's one of the leading products in its market.

My second project there was about enabling the desktop version of Office to be rented and backed by online services. At the time the idea was novel, and nobody believed it'd succeed, _especially_ because Ballmer was pushing it pretty hard. But succeed it did, wildly.

I know multiple such examples anecdotally as well, from friends. The initial versions of Azure seemed like a waste of time also (VMs topped out at like 32GB, everything sucked mightily throughout the entire stack, nobody thought it has a fighting chance). Today it's the second largest cloud, and growing rapidly. Still kinda sucks though. :-)

The initial version of Bing crawler was pretty horrible also (index team had more time, so their code looked squeaky clean in comparison), and it spent years trailing behind Google until they figured out how to close the gap (with "hiybbprqag" thing - the press got it wrong, they weren't "stealing" Google results per se; they augmented training data with clicks that come from Google search pages IIRC). Today Bing powers Duck Duck Go among other things. It's still not a wild success, but it's most definitely not a waste of time either.