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

Kind of reminds me of how my brother built a website for playing scrabble online, but because of the obvious trademark/copyright issues, he made it a private site behind an invite-only login. I don’t know if it’s still running, but because he was working on and off writing for TV at the time and doing tech support for a lot of Hollywood types, a lot of the users were Hollywood folks including a number of names of people that you’d recognize.

Not me, but "the other team".

Industrial project, new machines to do new things, and the companies internal + one external team were tasked to buid an "enterprise grade" software to manage and control the process, show analytics, trends, etc., for everyone from the line worker to management, marketing etc.

They were working on it for a about a year and were maybe half-done, when the machines had to start the work, so they hired us (a third outside company) to "hack something up". It was a complex machine, configured internally, so basically it was just check if there was enough material (on a scale) on the "input" side, check that the output (a scale again) was not "full" (both configurable in a config file), trigger the machine to do its job, and save the diagnostic number (6 values) together with numbers for the scales to a database + grafana for visualizations. The machine was even smart enough to not start the work without material on the input and stop if the output was clogged, so even if we screwed it up, it wouldn't matter.

Two days later, we had a working prototype, a year later the internal team was still working on the software, and the "prototype" was still in production, then that project got dumped, and the ~100 lines of python on a raspberrypi (it was just a "prototype", just for a few weeks... yeah) are still running the machine... and still is.

> IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places.

I hate to agree, but yeah.

I'm watching my husband go through a CS degree course right now, and the stuff he talks about I'm just like "why are they focusing on this, you literally never use this."

His "computer graphics" class was all about using the original GLUT library. The school specifically highlighted M1 Macs as good computers for their CS department students to use. Think about this combo for about 5s.

Yeah, the lib wasn't available in arm format...

When corporations stop being small they commonly turn plagued with some of the issues the centrally planned soviet economy had, unless the executives and bosses realise they are in a centrally planned organisation and meticulously guard against such problems.

I suspect that explains some of the examples in the thread.

Sometimes you also put people on busywork so you don't have to fire them, because you don't want them going to your competitors or have to go through the drudgery of hiring replacements later on when the times have changed again.

Once me and my two developer colleagues were put on building an extension for an existing SaaS-product, the assumption from the higher-ups were that another customer segment that is also subsidised by the government would be profitable to sell the product to. One board member with background in Google couldn't keep his fingers out of it so it boiled down to putting two people who had never built software with static typing or the regular mess of web client tooling suddenly having to use TypeScript and a bulky UI lib based on Vue.

We spent four months, one 'man-year', me trying to both put out fires in production and figure out how we were to tack on TS onto the horrifying PHP application we had and also teach my teammates how to approach problem solving with static typing and 'reactive' (or whatever the kids call Vue-related frameworks). In the end we managed one view with a decent search form that sent a string and rendered some rows with pagination. At that time fires in production started to threaten cash flow so it got shelved.

It was a crappy idea to begin with, the new market had very different characteristics and actors in it many hard demands that we would have needed to spend quite some time, probably upwards a year in a setting my colleagues were comfortable with rather than TypeScript. Having an almost trivial integration with the tax authority to ease using that subsidy didn't change that, it turned out.

Depends on the vendor's goals. If it's to fatten and butcher a pig, and never see any future work from them, sure. If the vendor is hoping to have a sustained profitable relationship then not so much.