Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 794 posts

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

#691

Post by _DeadFred_ »

swatcoder wrote: post #316
calvinmorrison wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But they don't try to "buck the system" just for the sake of it. Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget…

Especially when the processes are beholden to certification authorities (say the FAA, FDA, etc) because the processes has to be approved and cert'd from the agencies. That's a fun one to unravel and co-ordinate getting changed in a timeframe keeping higher managements super optimistic timeframe that they decided to commit to, say the board, on.

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

#692

Post by ikiris »

epolanski wrote: post #647
sgentle wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sibling commenters: for what it's worth, the notion of an employee having a fiduciary duty to their employer isn't as crazy as it sounds. eg, see here: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1... That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty. If they weren't acting to their employer's benefit, t…

> That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty. There has to be proof about that. If everything was verbal how do you prove it? There's no way around the fact that sabotaging your company is illegal and a breach of contract.

The leap you took from following your director's expectations to sunset a product to sabotaging your company is pretty epic.

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

#693

Post by _DeadFred_ »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #569
calvinmorrison wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is insane cope. We make technology to assist end users perform the tasks they do. To say "well you're doing the task wrong, the tool is made so you do task X way instead" is to put the cart in front of the horse.

Not really though. We make technology to make SYSTEMs/Processes work, not individual tasks. Take ERP to an MRP level (manufacturing resource planning). It doesn't matter how it works best for Bob, we need to be able to have the part Bob schedules/orders from vendors/makes/QAs/builds from lower level parts feed what they feed when needed in a way that we can consistently/correctly plan, and that follows possible certification authorities requirements/pre-approved processes. This gets especially complicated on say an aerospace production line that has in the high five figures of different parts, with complex individual build configurations with each component in configurable items having it's own lead time, and where everything is JIT because otherwise you would have to sit on inventory levels worth multiples of what the entire company is worth, and every individual item/lot/etc needs to be tracked in perpetuity.

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

#694

Post by codingdave »

talldatethrow wrote: post #680
randomdata wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now I'm stuck working on it. Why not put those sales skills to work and sell the business to someone else?

Because there's a difference between selling a rough car you detail inside and out and sell for a good deal, versus selling a lemon. Deep down I know the product isn't that well liked, and a lot of the renewals are based on my salesmanship. I know I have a chance at fixing the bugs, because I wrote everything, while someone else would be screwed IMO. It just wouldn't be fair to sell it to someone because I know they'…

It sounds like you are underestimating pretty much this entire industry. Picking up codebases that are sketchy and new to us is just part of the job. Finding and fixing bugs is an exercise to get rolling, not an insurmountable challenge.

When people keep using software, it is because it solves a problem. They might not like the software but begrudgingly use it anyway because it solves that problem. So sure, pat yourself on the back for good salesmanship, but also realize that they keep using it because even if it is covered in warts, it still does the job.

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

#695

Post by wojciii »

Ages ago I worked for a German company who developed electronic parts. They had a large Finnish client. I worked on porting an OS for use in a mobile phone. We went to Finland to integrate and make sure everything worked. We ran tests and debugged. This took 3 days and we were done .. the company wanted me to stay for a whole week because they didn't bother to change the flight. I managed to convince them that it was not in their best interest to make my angry and stay at a hotel for the remainder of the week with nothing to do.

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

#696

Post by dang »

All (since it's been a while): there are about 700 comments in the current thread. To read them all, you need to click More links at the bottom of the page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942397&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942397&p=3

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

#698

Post by to11mtm »

Depends on the context.

1. A significant 're-architecting' of parts of our backend to metaphorically sell cars off the back of a truck... It was one of the few parts of an auto lease financier's chain that didn't have a called-out contract with one of the major players. I suppose this one wasn't entirely useless as we were able to reuse some of the concepts for future integration work.

2. At another shop, we did an integration with a startup that was providing a reasonably related service. Part of the gig was we were going to get something like 10$ for every client signed up. I think the project was a good 3-5 months of 1 Sr, 1-2 normal devs, a BA and QA's time. In the first 12 months after launch I don't even think we got enough to cover a weeks worth of pizza for the team.

3. Was not my team but I saw it happen, one of the above shops also wound up deciding 'Everyone should use the same ORM because cogs in a machine'. This included having a fully in production product port their entire app's NHibernate logic to EF6 on Oracle 11... This did not end well for the project at all, as on top of being a huge timesink to get things 'working', performance tanked and it hurt the project's already heavy maintenance costs.

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

#699

Post by worik »

veb wrote: post #362
worik wrote: post #140

For a very large software and hardware company's local office in NZ in 2001 What they asked for: Refreshing their suit of unit tests, 10,000 of them, that had gone stale (that applied to their widely used C++ telephony library) Budget NZ$1,000,000 (Don't ask what, why, really?) I joined half way through Half the budget spent, nothing to show, mission mysteriously changed to producing a deep packet inspection tool. (W…

Totally sounds like Spark :D

International.

I heard Spark was worse, but this was not it.

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

#700

Post by kgeist »

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…

Wow, we had the exact same situation. We had a 15 year old CRM/ERP developed in-house, full of very specific and complex business processes/rules/entities tailored to how our business works. At some point, someone decided to migrate to Dynamics CRM. As it wasn't realistic to migrate immediately, they chose to do it incrementally: the both CRMs would be active at the same time, and there would be lots of data synchronizations between them, and our managers/the system's users would learn how to use Dynamics CRM in the meantime. The project was scrapped after 1 year because they realized that fully migrating it would took many years, and the managers didn't like the new CRM because it was lacking functionality (didn't match the existing workflows), and overall the whole synchronization stuff was pretty fragile and full of bugs. Now we've chosen the path of improving dev practices in the existing CRM to impove its reliability instead of hoping that somehow magically a new CRM would solve all our problems without any effort.
Post reply on HN