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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?

#541

Post by danielscrubs »

baw-bag wrote: post #370
shireboy wrote: post #250

This is old, but my most pointless project: The CEO wanted a screen in every hall that showed the company "EnGUAGEment meter". Users would have to go to the app, choose from 10 or so canned messages like "Feeling productive", "Ready to conquer the day", and other such HR speak the CEO (or rather the HR committee he put on the important business of picking the list) felt was motivational. This would update a page that…

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.

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

#542

Post by anonzzzies »

Working on useless things is especially common in large enterprises; I worked on departmental stuff that was just there to burn budgets so next year they could get bigger budgets: software that is never used and never actually touched but is produced nonetheless. The pay was great but it didn’t feel good to spend time and effort on something that literally would be tossed on delivery.

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

#543

Post by replwoacause »

d_burfoot wrote: post #193
0xBDB wrote: post #73

I was hired to implement and operate a specific product for a specific customer who paid for four years of onsite support. I do other things too, but that's my one contractually obligated responsibility and my primary one. Turns out the customer didn't read the (enormously expensive) SOW. They don't want the product, can't ingest its output, don't want to do the work necessary to implement it, and on a recent roadmap…

One of the weirdest psychological insights, which many people including myself have discovered recently, is that a fake job that doesn't actually require any work can be more stressful and unpleasant than a real job.

I can attest to this phenomenon too.

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

#544

Post by Cyberdog »

meter wrote: post #344

I used to work for a defense contractor. There was a 3 month period where I had nothing to do. I was supposed write firmware for a piece of hardware, but the hardware was broken and wouldn’t even turn on. I was told to wait for the electrical engineers to fix it. I sat in the lab all day, for 8 hours a day, with no internet access (it was forbidden), pretending to write firmware that I couldn’t test, with no directio…

As a web developer of 17 years, I'm dumbstruck at the idea that you're making three times as much doing this as you did at a damned defense contractor. They must have been totally chumping you.

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

#545

Post by kristjansson »

sanderjd wrote: post #80

Oh I thought this was gonna be that like the entire product / company / idea was useless, not just like a small number of weeks' worth of work. I've probably created a hundred or more proofs of concept for things that turned out to be a bad idea. Say these averaged out to a week or so of work each, and that's about two full years of useless work. And that's ok! Most stuff you work on will get thrown away before you l…

Exactly. Go to an artist’s studio. Look at all the sketches, the rack of canvases in the corner, the detritus of creation all around.

Software, and product development in general, is ultimately a creative endeavor. A nontrivial portion of attempts end up in the trash.

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

#546

Post by vundercind »

thatguyagain wrote: post #13

I'm trying to think of a single actually useful thing I ever worked on..

It’s goddamn rare to work on something useful.

I’m not sure more than 50% of the code I’ve written in about 20 years of this was ever actually used by someone who wasn’t, like, working on the project.

Much of the rest shouldn’t have been written. Total waste, usually easy to see.

A lot more that’s basically just rearranging shit for little reason.

Yeah… very little was useful.

At some point you just have to stop giving a shit. You’ll pay me how much to dig a hole then fill it back up over and over?! Sure thing, how deep do you want it?

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

#547

Post by bmitc »

All of them? I do wonder if anything I have ever worked on has actually been useful in a real, honest sense. Yes, people use stuff I've worked on or been a part of and possibly still even do (and there's plenty of stuff that wasn't used at all or canceled similar to your story), but it's hard to know the projects' actual usefulness. Perhaps it depends on the definition of useful. I'd say that if something makes someone or something safer, happier, healthier, or some other similar criteria, then that was useful. But I'm not sure I've worked on anything like that, and I'm not sure most people do either.

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

#548

Post by duskwuff »

kn100 wrote: post #22

I'm trying to teach myself how to sniff and interact with i2c hardware on consumer products. I'm doing this by attempting to connect my standing desk to the internet. Literally the whole goal is to have a "make desk go up" and "make desk go down" button in my Home Assistant. The real goal is learning to sniff i2c though.

You may be interested in a friend's product:

https://github.com/tjhorner/upsy-desky

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

#549

Post by vaylian »

williamcotton wrote: post #252
vharuck wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still do core sets (every Summer, IIRC) that fulfill those basic edition sets. Lately, they've been set in external intellectual properties. Last year's was Lord of the Rings. Might sound bad, but the D&D set rekindled magic in my game group. They had a Jumpstart product, where you could buy two half-decks and mix them together. But it looks like the last printing of that was 2022. If you don't mind spending the…

They don't do core sets any more.

You are right that they currently don't create core sets any more. I wouldn't be surprised if they change their mind /again/ in the future.

See also: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Core_set

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

#550

Post by yhager »

bmitc wrote: post #547

All of them? I do wonder if anything I have ever worked on has actually been useful in a real, honest sense. Yes, people use stuff I've worked on or been a part of and possibly still even do (and there's plenty of stuff that wasn't used at all or canceled similar to your story), but it's hard to know the projects' actual usefulness. Perhaps it depends on the definition of useful. I'd say that if something makes someo…

You've basically summarized David Graeber's book - Bullshit Jobs[1]. Highly recommended.

[1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-Jobs/David-G...

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