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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?

#461

Post by dopheide »

smcameron wrote: post #449

20 something years ago I spent the better part of a year writing a 3rd party RAID controller driver for Project Monterey (IBM and SCO's ill-fated unix collab) only for the entire project to get canceled literally the day after I finally got the machine to successfully boot up off the storage controlled by my driver. I like to think I got to do all the fun parts of driver development unbothered by any of the boring, t…

Interesting. Around that time I was working at a place that was contracted to build and host binaries for zSeries/pSeries in support of IBM's Linux on the mainframe effort. We didn't actually use any of it. I think we were just there to make it look like there was 3rd party support, even though it was all funded by IBM.

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

#463

Post by sour-taste »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #88

It was allegedly a front end for configuring traffic signals, allegedly to be used by the kind of Engineer (uppercase E) with licensure from the state. It was actually just a Front. You'd buy it and then our support people (without said licensure), instead of supporting the software, would go out into the field and configure the things for you.

This sounds illegal. I love it.

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

#464

Post by plants »

I’ll bite. I worked at a very large Fortune 500 company for a few years. Through some twist of fate, I ended up on an overfunded ML organization that was under no pressure to produce anything of business value. The executive in charge of this operation let this fly for about a year before they realized they weren’t getting anything valuable out of it. They put pressure on the VP of the org to start producing business value or else.

Fast forward another month or so and there are six hastily thrown together initiatives in which our organization is contracted to other organizations to “help them out”. The team dynamics were atrocious - our team was met with skepticism as to why we were helping out (was the other team not doing their job well enough?), and people on our team were often clueless on the business subject matter that we were supposed to be consulting on.

I was assigned to one of these initiatives, and upon digging into the business problem, our team realized that the feature importance was completely contained within a single categorical feature in the model. All other features in the model were comparable to uniformly randomly generated features. In the selfish interest of being able to claim that they “solved their problem with ML”, it was clear that either the model developer or the team at large had obscured this fact.

In an effort to save face, the VP kept us on the project, despite the poor relations and lack of useful features to improve the model. We didn’t improve the model and eventually, the VP ended up being “pushed out”. Last I checked, this VP is currently the CEO of a startup that recently raised a $100M seed round.

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

#465

Post by all2 »

Aloha wrote: post #428
rdl wrote: post #415

Worse than useless -- net negative -- everything related to Iraq/Afghanistan. I didn't go over there because I thought it was a good idea (nation building in either place is dumb, and any conflict at all in Iraq was dumb), and while individual projects sometimes made things locally better (like, speeding up network connectivity on a specific base), it was overall a dumb project which made things worse because it was…

We built the Taliban a whole lot of nice infrastructure. Maybe they'll be able to use it, probably not though.

The US funded the Taliban. And Al-queda. And the other major terrorist orgs. They're all US funded and trained.

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

#466

Post by canadianfella »

anonymouse008 wrote: post #373
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…

Change this from ERP to POS and you've scripted 9/10ths of the pains for many quick service restaurant chains. Story time: people are dense as hell. This one idiot put in his personal SSN to open $XX/m a year POS account. This account currently manages just over a hundred locations, and this fool's TIN has just been raking in millions for a few years all because 'I needed to get us signed up!' And what's better!? The…

[dead]

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

#467

Post by wging »

theragra wrote: post #336
delecti wrote: post #155

It was at Amazon and I don't remember exactly what the service was called, I think it was AdSomething. It was while I worked on the Kindle Special Offers (taking advantage of the "off" screen of an e-ink Kindle to show ads) project. I find that to be one of the less offensive forms of advertising, so I was generally pretty happy on that team for a time. But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a s…

This is so painful. Kindle still after all these years cannot select a single word without a comma. So, dictionary does not work. Such simple thing could be fixed, but you did all this bullshit work instead.

I’ve used a Kindle since 2012 and I don’t think I have ever seen that kind of dictionary issue. On my Kindle, even though text highlighting behaves as you describe, dictionary lookups still work because punctuation is stripped before searching. For example I just highlighted “doing,” (including the comma) and the dictionary shows the definition of the word “doing”. I wonder if it works differently for languages other than English. (There is a different problem, that the stemming/trimming can be too aggressive and gets you irrelevant words in searches — i.e. ‘several’ when you search ‘severance’.)

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

#468

Post by Izkata »

majikandy wrote: post #279
exccenture wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at Accenture back when they paid workers overtime. As engagement managers got into overage (underestimated projects, often fixed fee), they would put pressure on their workers to work overtime but not log the hours. Two law firms were already reaching out to workers ~2002 trying to form a class for a class action lawsuit. My boss came by one Friday morning and informed me i'd be onsite working all week…

I feel there is something missing in this story… what was implied by your email about cancelling your flight home the agreement to only log 40 hours? Sounds like you were just saying “affirmative”… what is the stunt he thinks you were pulling? And what is the second email about which you mention gmail and taking him off. It was a great story until that point and I want to know what happened next, I feel I’m missing s…

Only working 40 hours is different from only logging 40 hours, this is the important part:

> they would put pressure on their workers to work overtime but not log the hours.

The email was to get in writing that his boss told him to lie about how many hours he worked.

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

#469

Post by poulsbohemian »

Can I just say that this thread is Exhibit A for me as to why I bristle when people claim that we're all going to be replaced by ChatGPT? Sure software development will evolve and change just like any profession, but what we do is so bloody complex at times that I just don't believe we won't be developing software (whatever that comes to mean) for decades to come.

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

#470

Post by jiggawatts »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #255
rm445 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is surprising, the industry of implementing industry-standard ERP systems is pretty established. I'd have expected it to go way over time and budget (they always do) but eventually succeed. Usually success is in proportion to the company's willingness to admit they're not special and can do the same things as other companies instead of having everything bespoke.

I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on mostly manufacturing and distribution the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out o…

I've noticed that the same applies to any large inflexible platform, such as the public clouds.

If you do things the "native" way in Azure or AWS, you'll be fine, just like millions of other customers.

If you try and make the cloud work like your old data centre platform, then you'll have a bad time.

I just watched a customer spend $2M to deploy software routers to replace the "bad" cloud-native routers. Now everything is more difficult, slower, and just all-round bad. But they "had" to do it. (Narrator: No, they didn't.)

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