Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?
793 comments
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942397&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942397&p=3
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 CTO (my boss) made it clear that we strongly felt this would not only go way over budget, but ultimately fail as a project.
Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor. After the CTO and I expressed our concerns about the scale of the project and the sheer amount of functionality involved, the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" and were more than prepared, which was music to the ears of the CFO.
Daily 2-3 hour meetings followed (for many months) to define the scope of the project. Within each meeting I sort of zoned out because it became very obvious that no only did the vendor not understand the scale of the work involved, but had started cutting corners everywhere/leaving out crucial functionality, and this was just the scoping stage, no development had even started yet.
I eventually departed the company but kept in contact with the CTO and learned that after 5 years (project was scoped for 2), the migration was abandoned costing multiple millions of dollars with nothing to show for it.
Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor. After the CTO and I expressed our concerns about the scale of the project and the sheer amount of functionality involved, the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale" and were more than prepared, which was music to the ears of the CFO.
Daily 2-3 hour meetings followed (for many months) to define the scope of the project. Within each meeting I sort of zoned out because it became very obvious that no only did the vendor not understand the scale of the work involved, but had started cutting corners everywhere/leaving out crucial functionality, and this was just the scoping stage, no development had even started yet.
I eventually departed the company but kept in contact with the CTO and learned that after 5 years (project was scoped for 2), the migration was abandoned costing multiple millions of dollars with nothing to show for it.
>The CFO and some senior leadership erroneously blamed it for their shortcomings/used it as a scapegoat
the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is secondary.
the key thing to understand about ERP systems is that this is their primary purpose. anything else they claim to do is secondary.
Which is why they are vastly better whilst in the middle of a tricky migration, especially if it is going badly, and especially especially if it is being done by the most expensive contractors.
yes, the key is to always have some sort of migration happening so every problem can be addressed by saying "this will be resolved after the new ERP is rolled out"
And you can decline to do literally any piece of work because you need to focus on the migration.
Perfect scheme.
Perfect scheme.
Or “it’s best to wait till the migration complete before our team needs to do anything”
The latter half of your sentence suggests this project may actually have been a roaring success (for the vendor).
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.
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!? They still can't get out of the wet paper bag, because otherwise "we'll someone might start selling candy or something unapproved" > we'll isn't that's what your franchise liaisons and agreements are for?! I'm just beside myself.
I'm so hyped on this because this one 'immovable problem' prevents me from having API access to my locations accounts. Everything just hurts. /rant
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!? They still can't get out of the wet paper bag, because otherwise "we'll someone might start selling candy or something unapproved" > we'll isn't that's what your franchise liaisons and agreements are for?! I'm just beside myself.
I'm so hyped on this because this one 'immovable problem' prevents me from having API access to my locations accounts. Everything just hurts. /rant
I swear the only way to get an ERP or POS change to work is to start a competitor using the new solution and wait for them to acquire you.
And then live forever with two systems running side by side.
And then live forever with two systems running side by side.
Would you mind breaking down the situation in a little more detail? Not my field and I find your story interesting.
I also don't totally understand, what's a TIN for example (Taxpayer Identification Number?) and why is it making money? (Don't taxes go to the state?)
Yeah, it’s the identifier the government uses to attribute income for, and hence calculate the resulting taxes.
In this case it sounds like a midsize business is using some random guy’s number, so the tax authorities are under the impression there’s a guy pulling in millions personally, and a company with no income. Given that individuals and companies get taxed differently in many different jurisdictions concurrently this will be a mess to untangle.
In this case it sounds like a midsize business is using some random guy’s number, so the tax authorities are under the impression there’s a guy pulling in millions personally, and a company with no income. Given that individuals and companies get taxed differently in many different jurisdictions concurrently this will be a mess to untangle.
Wow that's amazing, thanks for explaining
> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale"
Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
Quite the opposite, they are experienced with those endless migrations.
French poet Paul Valery once said: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned".
It is the same for those projects. You just gotta keep paying forever.
French poet Paul Valery once said: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned".
It is the same for those projects. You just gotta keep paying forever.
It's inevitable that Sales will put Product in a bad spot because they're too good at selling their own innocence.
I was a top 0.1% salesperson nationwide in car sales. I read a bunch of lean startup stuff, learned to make a minimum viable product, and then started selling to companies with 20-80 employees. I'm likable and good at selling, so I got 34 companies using this garbage I made. It's the worst nightmare ever to keep people motivated to use it, keep fixing things I made as a rookie developer, keep adding or saying no to features.
Overall the product isn't really needed, and sorta sucks too. If I was an typical developer trying to pitch a startup idea to businesses, it probably would have never got off the ground and nobody would have wasted any time. Maybe eventually the developer would have landed on an idea so good it had REAL PMF, and made that.
But no, instead I sold some garbage and now I'm stuck working on it. There is such a thing as being too good at sales. You don't want sales talking people into bad ideas.
Overall the product isn't really needed, and sorta sucks too. If I was an typical developer trying to pitch a startup idea to businesses, it probably would have never got off the ground and nobody would have wasted any time. Maybe eventually the developer would have landed on an idea so good it had REAL PMF, and made that.
But no, instead I sold some garbage and now I'm stuck working on it. There is such a thing as being too good at sales. You don't want sales talking people into bad ideas.
Amazing story. Love your honesty.
Is there a world where you hire someone to build a more maintainable replacement?
Is there a world where you hire someone to build a more maintainable replacement?
It really wouldn't solve the main problem which is that the product itself isn't really needed or that great, code quality aside.
But it seems like 34 companies would feel differently?
Or maybe they're a bit disappointed it isn't that great, but who wants to onboard off back to hand made Excel sheets? Or spend time learning another tool. I've got very low churn so I guess it's all fine.
Hehe, reap what you sow :) But - you are not really stuck though. If you have managed to go from 0 to 34 customers before you can do it again. It is totally an option to drop that product and/or startup, and go with a better one (guided by your learnings). Up to you to decide what is the best way forward :)
This is hilarious. Can you describe the product or what it does? Is it something to do with payroll, benefits, or HR?
Construction project management for a certain segment.
> now I'm stuck working on it.
Why not put those sales skills to work and sell the business to someone else?
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'd be making a mistake.
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'd be making a mistake.
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.
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.
While I agree professionals pick up codebases left behind by several iterations of developers, I think picking up a large PHP/Jquery PM tool written by a first time self taught via YouTube and stack overflow developer might be many peoples idea of a bad time.
It doesn't really solve a problem. Not really atleast. It's a little better than using 6 Excel sheets via a google drive honestly. The reason it got sold is because in theory it sounds a lot better than Google docs. But it's only a little better. And it has its own host of difficulties (can't modify anything for example.. don't even ask me to add a column or rearrange a table for you).
I know it's not great because if I get a company using it, but don't hand hold onboarding to an extreme level, they never even really get going with it.
When selling it, if I don't really lay it on thick and do a spectacular job, they don't buy.
The reason they don't quit once on it isn't that it solves a great problem or is much better than their previous solution (almost always just Excel sheets), but because switching back to their abandoned system is harder than the $300 a month is worth. So they just keep paying.
Also, I've contacted and pitched wayyy more than 34 companies. Many companies are/were smart enough to pass on it.
I'm not writing for a sob story or to talk up MY salesmanship for whatever reason, but I wanted to share my main takeaway from this project.
When doing lean startup and trying to get your first customers, don't think youve struck gold just because you had a great person schmooze a few people into using your MVP. It can be a false start just based on their persuasion. At this point I'd rather tone down salesmanship a lot and see if I can find a product that really strikes a cord with them instead. Less false starts that way IMO. I'd much rather have gotten 1-2 costumers only, not 34, and realized this isn't worth pursuing.
It doesn't really solve a problem. Not really atleast. It's a little better than using 6 Excel sheets via a google drive honestly. The reason it got sold is because in theory it sounds a lot better than Google docs. But it's only a little better. And it has its own host of difficulties (can't modify anything for example.. don't even ask me to add a column or rearrange a table for you).
I know it's not great because if I get a company using it, but don't hand hold onboarding to an extreme level, they never even really get going with it.
When selling it, if I don't really lay it on thick and do a spectacular job, they don't buy.
The reason they don't quit once on it isn't that it solves a great problem or is much better than their previous solution (almost always just Excel sheets), but because switching back to their abandoned system is harder than the $300 a month is worth. So they just keep paying.
Also, I've contacted and pitched wayyy more than 34 companies. Many companies are/were smart enough to pass on it.
I'm not writing for a sob story or to talk up MY salesmanship for whatever reason, but I wanted to share my main takeaway from this project.
When doing lean startup and trying to get your first customers, don't think youve struck gold just because you had a great person schmooze a few people into using your MVP. It can be a false start just based on their persuasion. At this point I'd rather tone down salesmanship a lot and see if I can find a product that really strikes a cord with them instead. Less false starts that way IMO. I'd much rather have gotten 1-2 costumers only, not 34, and realized this isn't worth pursuing.
Well, I know several experienced software developers with good software ideas, but no clue how to sale them.
It sounds like bringing them and you together would basically be a guarantees success.
By the way; I am working as a self-employed developer and my favourite project is a software that has initially been written by a self-taught programmer who both started and ended his career with that software. As far as I heard (he was already out when I joined) he got burned out and said that he never wanted to work with anything software related again. He used PHP and jQuery. I've mainly added new stuff instead of touching the old code, while only only refactoring the old stuff where necessary in very small increments. Most other devs really hate to touch it, but I don't understand why. Of course it would be better to replace it with a new version that has been built on top of a proper framework, but their management is too stubborn to understand that an incremental approach is the better way of handling this. So instead, they try to get a "complete understanding" of the project and try to create a completely new version in a "big bang" approach. This usually takes a few months or even a year until this new replacement project is considered a failure while I keep maintaining and cleaning up the old project. It's been six years for now and even their most "optimistic" people currently say that the old software will be running for at least two more years. Having built up a lot of knowledge over that time, I could easily create a new version in less than half a year (I actually think two months, but I'm tripling my estimation for safety), but that would make their management look bad (long story), so I don't get the green light to do that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Two month sound too optimistic" you say? Well it's an inbox, an outbox and one form with a few calculations in between. I have created way more complex software than that in the last years.
It sounds like bringing them and you together would basically be a guarantees success.
By the way; I am working as a self-employed developer and my favourite project is a software that has initially been written by a self-taught programmer who both started and ended his career with that software. As far as I heard (he was already out when I joined) he got burned out and said that he never wanted to work with anything software related again. He used PHP and jQuery. I've mainly added new stuff instead of touching the old code, while only only refactoring the old stuff where necessary in very small increments. Most other devs really hate to touch it, but I don't understand why. Of course it would be better to replace it with a new version that has been built on top of a proper framework, but their management is too stubborn to understand that an incremental approach is the better way of handling this. So instead, they try to get a "complete understanding" of the project and try to create a completely new version in a "big bang" approach. This usually takes a few months or even a year until this new replacement project is considered a failure while I keep maintaining and cleaning up the old project. It's been six years for now and even their most "optimistic" people currently say that the old software will be running for at least two more years. Having built up a lot of knowledge over that time, I could easily create a new version in less than half a year (I actually think two months, but I'm tripling my estimation for safety), but that would make their management look bad (long story), so I don't get the green light to do that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Two month sound too optimistic" you say? Well it's an inbox, an outbox and one form with a few calculations in between. I have created way more complex software than that in the last years.
If it was a real good idea, I'd argue it wouldn't be that hard to sell.
Reality would be that a combo of a good developer and a good salesperson would get into a similar situation that I got myself into, but with a better more manageable code base. Not the worst outcome in the world, that's basically most b2b saas technically.
Reality would be that a combo of a good developer and a good salesperson would get into a similar situation that I got myself into, but with a better more manageable code base. Not the worst outcome in the world, that's basically most b2b saas technically.
are you still selling this?
imagine a software buying consultant. You could sell the service to your existing clients.
Long ago i made a few html websites for businesses then explained basic html and ftp to the owner. It was perfect except from other webdesign shops hammering my clients.
Long ago i made a few html websites for businesses then explained basic html and ftp to the owner. It was perfect except from other webdesign shops hammering my clients.
> Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
Depends on the type of sales. A pretty good indicator is how many times a customer makes a purchase from the same salesperson. If it's just one purchase (like ERP consulting) it could be grifty/etc like in this case. If they're buying from the same guy for years, there's often very different types of salespeople. I used to think all salespeople fit the sketchy used car salesman type, but after working with great salespeople I know better. This is a big blind spot for us techical/engineering types.
Depends on the type of sales. A pretty good indicator is how many times a customer makes a purchase from the same salesperson. If it's just one purchase (like ERP consulting) it could be grifty/etc like in this case. If they're buying from the same guy for years, there's often very different types of salespeople. I used to think all salespeople fit the sketchy used car salesman type, but after working with great salespeople I know better. This is a big blind spot for us techical/engineering types.
When you are working with the same sales people multiple times, it is an instance of treated prisoners dilemma. Used car salesman is just one time prisoners dilemma.
They’re not even lying, usually. They just don’t have the expertise to tell the customer exactly what they can’t have. That’s why you have sales people.
[deleted]
It infuriates me that all of these aren't met with a 'if it turns out you can't, you need to make it right at your cost' clause.
Estimation is hard but it seems it's far too easy for the vendor to blatantly lie with all the risk on the customer.
Estimation is hard but it seems it's far too easy for the vendor to blatantly lie with all the risk on the customer.
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 of Shopify (or x system) daily, and you are not that special. You will spend 10x as much trying to NOT use the system rather than trying to use it".
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 of Shopify (or x system) daily, and you are not that special. You will spend 10x as much trying to NOT use the system rather than trying to use it".
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 while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible.
You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
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 while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible.
You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
I'm in small and medium business. A lot of homegrown and unique processes that are just dandy. I mean it they're fine. But when faced by things like standard GAAP accounting processes, or even EDI. You can't argue with it. You can't tell walmart oh no well actually I didn't mean to send that 850. It costs you money. You can't willy nilly charge credit cards anymore. Its just life. It makes it hard for them not just in IT but also to hire new people or replace retiring ones. Only Bob knew this process.
What makes the clients we work with great and unique and what I love is the products they make or the problems they solve for customers, but they're not tech companies or banks. The ones who succeed are the ones who focus on thier core value and core skills and not random accounting process X Y or Z.
What makes the clients we work with great and unique and what I love is the products they make or the problems they solve for customers, but they're not tech companies or banks. The ones who succeed are the ones who focus on thier core value and core skills and not random accounting process X Y or Z.
I work specifically with small and medium businesses too, and can echo that sentiment! I'd love to know more about what you do. Love working with SMBs but don't know a lot of other people in that space.
Its nice. It's certainly not high faluting as a lot of HN jobs but I make good money for where I live, our clients are mostly regional but a lot of the 50 states have customers over the years. Mostly we work on implementing and servicing ERP systems. Our differentiator is our skillet in integrations and holistic problem solving. Since the ERP sits in the middle of almost every IT venn diagram, we run into new tech on a weekly basis.
Besides the ERP consulting bit we sell niche solutions in our product space. Mostly comms(EDI, ecommerce,etc) or payroll/bookkeeping addons.
Besides the ERP consulting bit we sell niche solutions in our product space. Mostly comms(EDI, ecommerce,etc) or payroll/bookkeeping addons.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's not really anyone saying "you're doing the task wrong", it's more like "you're doing it only so slightly differently that we need a few months to write customizations for it. We'll send you the bill".
Those big ERPs are not really blank canvases, but when you need those micro-customizations in the wrong place, they can become one.
End users involved in the integration don't really want to learn new processes or even do things slightly different, as they know that changing process often involves burning a lot of political capital and they often lack awareness to know that "just using the ERP the way it's intended" is cheaper. And consultants are experts in finding a chance to perform those micro changes. It's a perfect marriage.
Those big ERPs are not really blank canvases, but when you need those micro-customizations in the wrong place, they can become one.
End users involved in the integration don't really want to learn new processes or even do things slightly different, as they know that changing process often involves burning a lot of political capital and they often lack awareness to know that "just using the ERP the way it's intended" is cheaper. And consultants are experts in finding a chance to perform those micro changes. It's a perfect marriage.
I understand your point, but that's not how things work.
If you source the right ERP you will be presented with procedures and processes that have been streamlined and optimized leveraging previous experiences of literally hundreds of businesses. Smaller and larger than yours. It's an error to dismiss the standard solution without deep consideration.
Any process into a good ERP (e.g. managing a deposit payment, managing stock, documents transformation, uniqueness of product codes, and so on) is battle tested and may be ready to solve issues that at the moment your company in not seeing, but perhaps will have to face with the growth of the next five years and in five years perhaps you'll see the reasons why things were setup that way into the ERP.
I have been happily humbled more than once by that.
Check how things are supposed to work into your ERP, understand them and comply. That's how to have a functioning ERP in your company. Or just don't buy it and go for excel, it's cheaper (but just at the beginning, be warned).
Just to add... a lot of processes are very defined. I know HN loves to startups that reinvent the wheel but things like GAAP are pretty much the same workflows in any biz. AP, AR, SO, POs, etc.
A cope with what? Thats literally correct. The tool was made to replace 5 assistants, accountants and paper pushers. There's a design to this ginormous system that works best when you lean into it.
Its why picking the right ERP is very iimportat
Its why picking the right ERP is very iimportat
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.
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.)
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.)
The problem is it is often very expensive to adapt other components to fit the inflexible platform.
In your example, the customer may have had software that depended on the routers having some functionality that the cloud native routers didn't. Sure if they had designed for that cloud from the beginning it wouldn't be a big deal. But now, that $2M might be less than the cost of changing all their other systems to work around the limitations of the cloud native router. I've seen situations play out like that a few times.
In your example, the customer may have had software that depended on the routers having some functionality that the cloud native routers didn't. Sure if they had designed for that cloud from the beginning it wouldn't be a big deal. But now, that $2M might be less than the cost of changing all their other systems to work around the limitations of the cloud native router. I've seen situations play out like that a few times.
That kind of logic seems to make sense at first, but just confirms my point: trying to change IPv4 to suit you is a fools errand. Change what you do to hit ordinary bog-standard IPv4 instead and miraculously you’ll have fewer impediments.
You clearly have no idea how complex routing is if that is your take on this.
A random state government department has no "business needs" that require custom IPv4 routing technology that isn't supported by the two biggest public clouds. Any such need is imagined, or an outright error.
In this particular case they were sold a product that serves one purpose: multi-cloud solutions across international boundaries where no single telco can connect all of the data centre locations.
Their handful of locations are all in one city and well-connected by multiple telcos because... they're a state government, not a multi-national corporation. They're blocked by the constitution from expanding inter-state, let alone internationally. That would be a literal act of war.
That didn't stop the vendor's sales team showing slides with titles like: "What if you need to expand into the Chinese market?".
In this particular case they were sold a product that serves one purpose: multi-cloud solutions across international boundaries where no single telco can connect all of the data centre locations.
Their handful of locations are all in one city and well-connected by multiple telcos because... they're a state government, not a multi-national corporation. They're blocked by the constitution from expanding inter-state, let alone internationally. That would be a literal act of war.
That didn't stop the vendor's sales team showing slides with titles like: "What if you need to expand into the Chinese market?".
I usually ask, is it a differentiator for our business to run X?
I feel the same above technology in general.
E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology, rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they end up being mediocre their whole career.
E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology, rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they end up being mediocre their whole career.
A wonderful statement straight out of ERP's sales guys (or other folks on the same side dependent on keeping the cash flowing). FYI what we trash here are typical SAP-level migrations and all horrible stories that always come with it, maybe your tiny company does things better but then its a different story in a different market.
I have yet to meet a single company which works like ERP are designed to work. This is their edge over competition, their reason for existence on brutal market. And ERP wipe that out, with the most expensive wiper you can imagine, while selling various bullshit left and right, and constantly lying to given company how everything is fine and under control.
Truly, a way to kill a company. The fact that some survived it all to tell a story just shows how resilient whole such org is to such a massive stressor that ERP migration always is.
They sell first and foremostly a lie - that you can have cover-it-all system just like competition, to match your unique way of working, without suffering tremendously, fit like a glove out-of-box (when reality is exactly opposite). It just never works, more like hammering a concrete glove on your progressively more disfigured hand, while being told how rosy your future will be.
I have yet to meet a single company which works like ERP are designed to work. This is their edge over competition, their reason for existence on brutal market. And ERP wipe that out, with the most expensive wiper you can imagine, while selling various bullshit left and right, and constantly lying to given company how everything is fine and under control.
Truly, a way to kill a company. The fact that some survived it all to tell a story just shows how resilient whole such org is to such a massive stressor that ERP migration always is.
They sell first and foremostly a lie - that you can have cover-it-all system just like competition, to match your unique way of working, without suffering tremendously, fit like a glove out-of-box (when reality is exactly opposite). It just never works, more like hammering a concrete glove on your progressively more disfigured hand, while being told how rosy your future will be.
I worked in consulting for over a decade, and... yeah. When people migrate from one system to another, they try to make the new system work exactly the way the original system does, especially if the original system is homegrown. That lack of flexibility tends to be responsible for more than half the cost (and time span) of the migration.
"We hate everything about our system, get us a new one"
"We want the new system to work exactly like our old one"
It's probably not worth the money...
"We want the new system to work exactly like our old one"
It's probably not worth the money...
There's also the related failure mode of deciding you're going to fix all your other system problems as part of the migration, bloating the scope and creating too much complexity. Just do the necessary stuff, migrate, and then go back and fix the nice to haves.
So, basically throw out everything that made them unique and differentiated, and do things like the Germans do.
Not quite.
I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times I've been on the receiving end, working at companies undergoing a large migration.
It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere in the system. Death by thousand papercuts.
There is no incentive from both sides to change: the company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees don't want to change how they work (because change is often stressful), and the person paying the bills is not getting the full picture.
If there's anything that is actually really "unique" (in a good way), then you spend money. Often this means not customizing the ERP, but actually writing new software that integrates with it.
I never worked in those ERP companies, but a few times I've been on the receiving end, working at companies undergoing a large migration.
It is very often stuff that doesn't really matter, is highly inefficient, and requires small changes everywhere in the system. Death by thousand papercuts.
There is no incentive from both sides to change: the company wants to keep modifying to get $$$, employees don't want to change how they work (because change is often stressful), and the person paying the bills is not getting the full picture.
If there's anything that is actually really "unique" (in a good way), then you spend money. Often this means not customizing the ERP, but actually writing new software that integrates with it.
Right. I’ve spent weeks creating automations in a business I knew very well, that would most likely save a few minutes per month for a low salary employee.
But the RFP said I had to do it, and the customer insisted that I follow the letter of the RFP, rather than hit the high value parts of the project.
The two problems with this are that the cost of automation far exceeded the possible future cost of the manual process, and working on this automation took oxygen away from the stuff that would help people.
Needless to say, it was a disaster.
But the RFP said I had to do it, and the customer insisted that I follow the letter of the RFP, rather than hit the high value parts of the project.
The two problems with this are that the cost of automation far exceeded the possible future cost of the manual process, and working on this automation took oxygen away from the stuff that would help people.
Needless to say, it was a disaster.
That’s a great point. Very often the cost of automating something in those large systems is larger than the cost of a minimum wage person spending a couple hours a day clicking stuff…
6 years ago I was called as a contractor by the company I work for as they were desperate that their ERP was just a money drain and despite the money was not functioning at all.
Fast forward 6 years. I'm a manager at that company, responsible for business processes and it systems.
The ERP works great, everybody's happy.
Secret recipe: dismantle custom company processes.
Culture change: realize that company's not that special and don't need special ERP recipes.
Takeaway: if the ERP standard is set up in a certain way, probably there's a very good reason underneath that setup.
Story as old as time. It's a second system, they rarely work. The only hope is to come up with something small and exciting the a new generation moves too. Then you can build it to become the new thing.
Trying to build a total second system is nearly impossible if it's big and old.
Trying to build a total second system is nearly impossible if it's big and old.
Damned. I'd be tempted to write down in my resume "Company would've saved N million dollars and 5 years of their time had they listened to me" were it not such a double edged sword.
Better to write "managed critical scoping phase of $xx migration". Not your fault the company priorities later changed and it wasn't completed!
No one gets credit for "I told you so" - look at it this way, you didn't have the skill at the time to make the company listen to you.
How could you, in such a case?
They ignored the CTO on an issue that was 100% tech based. There was no winning, the board decided to ignore the person they hired to make that sort of decision for them.
I don't know, and maybe there was no solution. Just offering a different perspective.
Some things seem inevitable. I've really run myself through the wringer trying to figure out "what could I have done to achieve a better outcome for everyone involved."
I guess success and failure are both group efforts.
I guess success and failure are both group efforts.
short the stock
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.
The nice thing about consulting at Hershey is that they have candy closets where you can grab what you like, it occasionally includes new demo candy. And the whole town smells like chocolate.
What happened to the CFO?
Hmmm, maybe check his LinkedIn where he brags about the successful transition and ERP migration he led at that company.
That happened in my company.
The CIO left bragging about implementing itil on servicenow.
What they did was replacing RT for servicenow, and only for some ticketing queues. Nothing else, no change management, no cmdb, only an incident and non standard requests queues.
128k/ year, while RT still runs in a VM for all the other ticketing queues.
Lots of powerpoints.
128k/ year, while RT still runs in a VM for all the other ticketing queues.
Lots of powerpoints.
probably got hired by the vendor
I bet it was Oracle, SAP, or IBM. The hydraheaded horror of enterprise bloated licenses.
I feel this on a deep level since the ERP system at our company is in the middle of moving to one of these big vendors and so much is simply not working out, extending timelines and development cycles. Cost only goes up and ROI is pushed out beyond the horizon.
PLM is equally bad and a horror show of legacy vendors trying to sell their solutions with the promise of customizability. Again the small, more modern players in the PLM space are constantly ignored for the big legacy ones and it turns out those legacy platforms even in their latest iterations are inflexible at best or downright hellish at worst. The reason behind all of this? Service contracts and vendor lock-in are the main drivers of value for these vendors, rather than quality (and modern) engineering.
I feel this on a deep level since the ERP system at our company is in the middle of moving to one of these big vendors and so much is simply not working out, extending timelines and development cycles. Cost only goes up and ROI is pushed out beyond the horizon.
PLM is equally bad and a horror show of legacy vendors trying to sell their solutions with the promise of customizability. Again the small, more modern players in the PLM space are constantly ignored for the big legacy ones and it turns out those legacy platforms even in their latest iterations are inflexible at best or downright hellish at worst. The reason behind all of this? Service contracts and vendor lock-in are the main drivers of value for these vendors, rather than quality (and modern) engineering.
I've been on the other side of this. Big company was under the impression they could ultimately save money by switching from an enterprise ERP solution that costed them hundres of thousands of dollars in licences with an inhouse one. The only problem was the ERP was carrying 90% of the company on it's shoulders and this would've been a horribly large task. I worked on it for 2 years with incompentent managers and slow progress. After I left the company they continued for another 2 and then quit that endevour. Wasting a shitload of money (think 10 devs + managers for 4 years...).
>I once worked on an in-house ERP system which had been developed over about 15 years by various developers.
I read this and immediately became sick to my stomach. I despise working in corporate america.
I read this and immediately became sick to my stomach. I despise working in corporate america.
> I despise working in corporate america.
America might lead the way, but corporate anything, anywhere is pretty terrible.
America might lead the way, but corporate anything, anywhere is pretty terrible.
Was SAP or IBM the external vendor? :)
I've spent my entire 30 career in ERP Consulting (PeopleSoft), working with Payroll, Accounting, and Student management systems.
I have a current client that is a mirror of this exactly. They had one new executive go to a sales demo, and the sales guy told him it would be "live" in a few months, and he believed it. It was so laughable and downright embarrassing for the client. In this case, I know it is at least a 3-year project if you have competent team members and vendors. It also depends on how you define "success" and how many business processes you are willing to break. However, these can stretch into 5 year projects when you are working with mission critical systems running accounting and payroll. In those cases, you cannot move fast and break things.
Most organizations don't have competent teams, and the vendors are often made up of low-skilled offshore workers, which makes nuanced, complex projects very complicated. The sales side will promise the world then the implementation team is low skilled and underdelivers.
I have seen this with several other clients, replacing pieces of PeopleSoft modules with different applications. Sometimes they come back and sometimes they just suffer through it and then find a third option after the new system fails to deliver.
Most ERP systems are just CRUD systems. So, you end up with a working CRUD system being replaced by a new CRUD system. The old system had its strengths and weaknesses. The new system will solve some problems and break others.
You spend 3-5 years replacing a system only to end up in the same place you were before: A CRUD system. This is maddening unless you are the new vendor and getting enriched.
I have a current client that is a mirror of this exactly. They had one new executive go to a sales demo, and the sales guy told him it would be "live" in a few months, and he believed it. It was so laughable and downright embarrassing for the client. In this case, I know it is at least a 3-year project if you have competent team members and vendors. It also depends on how you define "success" and how many business processes you are willing to break. However, these can stretch into 5 year projects when you are working with mission critical systems running accounting and payroll. In those cases, you cannot move fast and break things.
Most organizations don't have competent teams, and the vendors are often made up of low-skilled offshore workers, which makes nuanced, complex projects very complicated. The sales side will promise the world then the implementation team is low skilled and underdelivers.
I have seen this with several other clients, replacing pieces of PeopleSoft modules with different applications. Sometimes they come back and sometimes they just suffer through it and then find a third option after the new system fails to deliver.
Most ERP systems are just CRUD systems. So, you end up with a working CRUD system being replaced by a new CRUD system. The old system had its strengths and weaknesses. The new system will solve some problems and break others.
You spend 3-5 years replacing a system only to end up in the same place you were before: A CRUD system. This is maddening unless you are the new vendor and getting enriched.
I’m sure it worked out well for the pocketbooks of the new management.
[deleted]
I worked on a six-month contract project for a large US retailer; the fact that everybody else I worked with was laid off the second week probably should have told me something was wrong, but they kept paying me so I kept showing up.
Anyway, the only task they ever gave me was to build Cisco router ACLs to match existing traffic in the stores; they needed to implement access control but wanted to make sure they weren't blocking anything important. Because many of the stores had been opened years before, there wasn't necessarily a consistent IT stack in the store; there were a lot of one-off solutions so they wanted a universal set of rules with per-store exception lists.
So, every week, someone would drop a few terabytes of network logs in an FTP server, separated by store, and I would distill them down to a set of rules; if something was being used in more than X number of stores, it went in the universal rule list, if it wasn't it went in a store exception list. At first I was doing it semi-manually, but eventually I built a database and wrote some SQL to mostly automate it - got it down to about two hours a week, most of it waiting for the DB, by the end. Once it was done, I would send all of my updates to a network engineer who was the designated point of contact for the access control project.
They had a lot of stores, and for some reason could only supply a certain amount of logs weekly, so when my contract was up there were still a number remaining. I tried to set up a meeting with the network engineer to go over the work to be done and the automation I'd built, but he never responded. Eventually I tracked down his desk in the vast corporate complex and paid him a visit. He was pleasant but told me that he wasn't even on the access control project and he thought it had probably been canceled at some point. He had been dutifully copying my updates to a network share somewhere in case they were ever needed. I gave him the SQL scripts and the database info and he put them out on the share where they probably still are today, a decade and a half later.
So that was six months of my working life.
Anyway, the only task they ever gave me was to build Cisco router ACLs to match existing traffic in the stores; they needed to implement access control but wanted to make sure they weren't blocking anything important. Because many of the stores had been opened years before, there wasn't necessarily a consistent IT stack in the store; there were a lot of one-off solutions so they wanted a universal set of rules with per-store exception lists.
So, every week, someone would drop a few terabytes of network logs in an FTP server, separated by store, and I would distill them down to a set of rules; if something was being used in more than X number of stores, it went in the universal rule list, if it wasn't it went in a store exception list. At first I was doing it semi-manually, but eventually I built a database and wrote some SQL to mostly automate it - got it down to about two hours a week, most of it waiting for the DB, by the end. Once it was done, I would send all of my updates to a network engineer who was the designated point of contact for the access control project.
They had a lot of stores, and for some reason could only supply a certain amount of logs weekly, so when my contract was up there were still a number remaining. I tried to set up a meeting with the network engineer to go over the work to be done and the automation I'd built, but he never responded. Eventually I tracked down his desk in the vast corporate complex and paid him a visit. He was pleasant but told me that he wasn't even on the access control project and he thought it had probably been canceled at some point. He had been dutifully copying my updates to a network share somewhere in case they were ever needed. I gave him the SQL scripts and the database info and he put them out on the share where they probably still are today, a decade and a half later.
So that was six months of my working life.
> ...he never responded. Eventually I tracked down his desk in the vast corporate complex and paid him a visit. He was pleasant but told me that he wasn't even on the access control project and he thought it had probably been canceled at some point...
I love it. A co-worker of mine told a similar story. For at least six months, his only regular responsibility was to compile a report every week and email it to a distribution list for the headquarters one echelon above us. It wasn't a ton of work, but it was all manual and he was meticulous. He dutifully did this without any feedback until someone finally replied to simply say, "We do not require this report, and have never required it. You may choose to either continue or discontinue sending it."
I love it. A co-worker of mine told a similar story. For at least six months, his only regular responsibility was to compile a report every week and email it to a distribution list for the headquarters one echelon above us. It wasn't a ton of work, but it was all manual and he was meticulous. He dutifully did this without any feedback until someone finally replied to simply say, "We do not require this report, and have never required it. You may choose to either continue or discontinue sending it."
BS: "Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the glitch. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally."
BP: 'We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end.'
BP: 'We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end.'
If the retailer is still in business that data has probably been lovingly migrated twice, and is now in a sharepoint somewhere.
It’s probably been leaked as well, maybe sitting in an unsecured S3 bucket for a while after one of those migrations.
It’s even more amusing to have something like that, it gets shelved in the archives, and five years later it somehow ended up being half rolled out because some bright eyed intern found it and thought it was procedure.
So that was six months of my working life >> /dev/null
> they kept paying me so I kept showing up.
What a line.
What a line.
If this was your main gig, congratulations on getting a big chunk of your life back to do whatever you wanted. I really enjoyed reading your story. It reminds me a little of “the story of Mac”.
https://wm-help.net/lib/b/book/2895812152/59
https://wm-help.net/lib/b/book/2895812152/59
I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make it suck intentionally.
Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird.
EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird.
EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
We had an internal tool that was written as a quick hack by a rogue developer but then became crucial for our operations. It was starting to show some rough edges and some performance limitations, so a big project was planned to replace it, run by two fancy new hires who demanded teams of underling developers and ridiculously inflated titles before they would tackle the project. It quickly became clear that this project would not bear fruit anytime soon, so my boss asked me on the down-low to produce an unofficial stopgap replacement for the parts of the old system that weren't scaling well. However, it could never threaten to be a full replacement, because then I'd be stepping on the toes of our expensive diva hires.
Long story short, last time I heard, both the original hack and my partial replacement were still in use ten years after I left. The big project ran for almost two years without replicating a single feature of the original hack. Right up to the last, the fancy guys produced an impressive series of complaints and excuses that basically said that they were doing everything right but doing things right didn't work because the problem and the context were wrong.
Long story short, last time I heard, both the original hack and my partial replacement were still in use ten years after I left. The big project ran for almost two years without replicating a single feature of the original hack. Right up to the last, the fancy guys produced an impressive series of complaints and excuses that basically said that they were doing everything right but doing things right didn't work because the problem and the context were wrong.
Different but similar. I once wrote a trivial lotto number selector app, at the request of some colleagues. It just emitted a few unique random numbers. Silly but why not.
They hated it.
I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number. They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)
They hated it.
I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number. They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)
That's not a useless project! It's a silly piece of code, but it gave joy to people, so I would say much more useful than most stories in this thread.
Back in the nineties my dad had the notion that if you make the computer select numbers at random many times, and you run statistics on the results you gain some "legitimacy" to these selections. So he asked me to write a "lotto number selector program", but it needed to run for a few hours and select many numbers and then output the ones that were selected the most or some such. Maybe it was more sophisticated, but I can't really remember the details. I guess I could just add a delay instead of actually selecting the numbers, but I wouldn't lie to my dad :)
It was super silly, but like you said, why not, I was a teen/tween and I didn't mind playing around with silly software.
He actually used it and actually filled out the lotto numbers based on it. No, we never won the millions :)
Also - I just visited a casino in Spokane, WA for the first time ever. Isn't that what all the machines there are doing? A random number emitter thingy with random delays, animation, music and flashing lights?
Back in the nineties my dad had the notion that if you make the computer select numbers at random many times, and you run statistics on the results you gain some "legitimacy" to these selections. So he asked me to write a "lotto number selector program", but it needed to run for a few hours and select many numbers and then output the ones that were selected the most or some such. Maybe it was more sophisticated, but I can't really remember the details. I guess I could just add a delay instead of actually selecting the numbers, but I wouldn't lie to my dad :)
It was super silly, but like you said, why not, I was a teen/tween and I didn't mind playing around with silly software.
He actually used it and actually filled out the lotto numbers based on it. No, we never won the millions :)
Also - I just visited a casino in Spokane, WA for the first time ever. Isn't that what all the machines there are doing? A random number emitter thingy with random delays, animation, music and flashing lights?
Reminds me of all the rules you have to apply to a random music player to make it feel random.
This is the same psychology in play when the lotto balls pop from the hopper or loot boxes open or slot machine wheels turn. A few seconds of suspense and fanfare for the reward is more satisfying.
Had thoughts on this the other day, about going to the office after the weekend always feeling bad, and waiting for the weekend always being the main thought during work. Yet, the weekend? Not actually that great. Feels totally artificial. Like work is not fun by definition.
A lot of these "certain delay for 'correct' response" rat feeder types of mechanics. Even when you know "the hit" is pointless or a waste, still heavily compelling anyways.
Cigarettes have a similar experience if you smoke too long. Days of "I don't 'actually' enjoy this anymore", yet my body still demands something that makes me vaguely nauseated now. Except, per the original comment, it is still the "suspense for a reward" that no longer exists.
A lot of these "certain delay for 'correct' response" rat feeder types of mechanics. Even when you know "the hit" is pointless or a waste, still heavily compelling anyways.
Cigarettes have a similar experience if you smoke too long. Days of "I don't 'actually' enjoy this anymore", yet my body still demands something that makes me vaguely nauseated now. Except, per the original comment, it is still the "suspense for a reward" that no longer exists.
I wrote a similar little app for the office lotto syndicate, way, way back. The older colleagues didn't trust it, and preferred coming up with their own 'random' numbers.
I still don't really know what there isn't to trust about generating random numbers for the lottery.
I still don't really know what there isn't to trust about generating random numbers for the lottery.
Rarely are people ever that honest to you in a corporate environment.
Usually you have to spend years working away and trying to guess why everything you're told to do makes the software worse.
Usually you have to spend years working away and trying to guess why everything you're told to do makes the software worse.
There may have been very good reasons to sunset the internal tool, and underhanded as this was it may have made a necessary process a lot less painful that it might otherwise have been.
this one's crazy lol.
frankly it sounds kind of fun, but i'm sure it was not in reality.
frankly it sounds kind of fun, but i'm sure it was not in reality.
It was actually pretty entertaining. This was almost 20 years ago.
Did you meet the coworkers who were complaining at the coffee brewer or sth like that, and overheard anything they said about it? If so, must have been an odd feeling, and hard to not smile and say something
Not that I remember. It was a company with about 2,000 employees and I generally stayed on the IT floor.
Isnt this fraud or something? At least this person caused damages. Sounds like they should be reported.
I don't understand why anybody would commit to work that explicitly and deliberately makes other people's lives miserable.
Where do you draw the line?
Where do you draw the line?
It was my first job. In that position I pretty much did whatever I was asked without questioning it.
Did a lot of great work with good people there too. Projects that lasted for nearly a decade.
Did a lot of great work with good people there too. Projects that lasted for nearly a decade.
I don’t mean to be the morality police, but that seems illegal.
It was an internal tool and the VP was the head of IT. Everything still worked, it was just painful to use. He could have pulled the plug on it at any time.
I don't think any of those details matter, that's still illegal and you could've gotten in trouble legally.
I don’t see how it’s any different than Windows ME.
What law was broken?
I'm curious; what law was being broken, exactly?
Breaking fiduciary duty would be the first that comes to my mind.
Previous user took a very huge risk. I've seen similar stuff happen, you can get sued (along whoever told you, but you need proof) just for the sake of making an example in front of the rest of the company.
Previous user took a very huge risk. I've seen similar stuff happen, you can get sued (along whoever told you, but you need proof) just for the sake of making an example in front of the rest of the company.
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, then whose? Employee fiduciary duty cases tend to be more about things like embezzling or competing with your own company while you're still working there.
An example of Fox getting shut down for trying to claim that sexual harassment was a breach of fiduciary duty: https://www.barnespc.com/news-articles/limitations-on-the-sc...
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, then whose? Employee fiduciary duty cases tend to be more about things like embezzling or competing with your own company while you're still working there.
An example of Fox getting shut down for trying to claim that sexual harassment was a breach of fiduciary duty: https://www.barnespc.com/news-articles/limitations-on-the-sc...
> 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.
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.
Thanks for the correction, TIL.
CEO can say it is his fiduciary duty to phase out old software and put a brand spanking new modern enterprise grade system.
Also, still it is not illegal. Just that the shareholders need to sue him to matter at all.
Also, still it is not illegal. Just that the shareholders need to sue him to matter at all.
Fiduciary duty is a particular legal concept about the responsibility one party has to another, and only applies in specific, defined circumstances. A random developer doesn't have a fiduciary duty to anyone, and he wasn't taking any risk.
Where do you think fiduciary duty exists as a random software dev?
The operative word is “internal” in OPs post.
Incentives and adoption goals for internal tools are weird at large corps. Intentional suckage is just another tool to drive migration
Incentives and adoption goals for internal tools are weird at large corps. Intentional suckage is just another tool to drive migration
Even if it were an external tool, I fail to understand how there would be a legal problem. Companies use all sorts of shenanigans to encourage users to migrate. Immoral? Sure, but software crossed that bridge a long time ago.
Heaps of people online have stories about how Microsoft tricked them into upgrading Windows.
Heaps of people online have stories about how Microsoft tricked them into upgrading Windows.
What laws do you think making a bad tool violates?
but you can't seem to name which crime.
morality <> legality
Roughly 15 years ago I worked for a large media company that was thinking about moving into the smart energy meter business.
I was late to join the team, but when I did, they'd already bought and branded thousands of meters that were boxed and ready to go in a nearby warehouse. The team had already built a number of APIs exposing controls for these meters as well as various monitoring and reporting interfaces. A UI already existed but it had issues, my job was to come in and fix that and get us ready for release.
We worked hard for a couple of months and whipped this thing into shape. Meanwhile a multi million budget was lined up for the marketing launch. Adverts where drafted, installation technicians where trained and merchandising was branded. All systems go.
It all drove towards a set in stone deadline and we busted our guts to get there... When the day arrived, there we sat. Ready. All features built, no bugs that we knew of. Ready to hit the 'go live' button. Honestly in 30 years working in the industry, that was the only time I think I've ever been in that situation.
Our product owner walks into the room and says, "erm, there's a couple of issues we need to discuss at board level. Hold tight guys I'll be back".
So we sit...
Two days later he returns, "erm, guys... the board aren't sure that this product is on brand. And they are concerned that if it fails it could be bad for reputation. So, we're not launching."
So we sat... for a month... working down our contracts whilst I taught myself Node.js
I was late to join the team, but when I did, they'd already bought and branded thousands of meters that were boxed and ready to go in a nearby warehouse. The team had already built a number of APIs exposing controls for these meters as well as various monitoring and reporting interfaces. A UI already existed but it had issues, my job was to come in and fix that and get us ready for release.
We worked hard for a couple of months and whipped this thing into shape. Meanwhile a multi million budget was lined up for the marketing launch. Adverts where drafted, installation technicians where trained and merchandising was branded. All systems go.
It all drove towards a set in stone deadline and we busted our guts to get there... When the day arrived, there we sat. Ready. All features built, no bugs that we knew of. Ready to hit the 'go live' button. Honestly in 30 years working in the industry, that was the only time I think I've ever been in that situation.
Our product owner walks into the room and says, "erm, there's a couple of issues we need to discuss at board level. Hold tight guys I'll be back".
So we sit...
Two days later he returns, "erm, guys... the board aren't sure that this product is on brand. And they are concerned that if it fails it could be bad for reputation. So, we're not launching."
So we sat... for a month... working down our contracts whilst I taught myself Node.js
Once I came to peace with realizing my job is to enable higher ups to do their job a lot of this came into perspective. Still a complete waste, but something somewhere was enabled.
> my job is to enable higher ups to do their job
Ouch, I like to think it's the other way around.
Ouch, I like to think it's the other way around.
A lot of executives have ego problems where they’re very vulnerable to not having their status reaffirmed. Others understand that everyone in a team has an important function in the whole of the business, that executives’ function is specific but not more important, and they treat each other as equals. We could call it being ego-driven vs mission-driven.
Most executives in big tech are firmly in the ego-driven camp and get high on their own supply of hot air. And they really believe that everyone’s function in the company is to serve them.
Notably, there are some leaders who are very mission-driven and see their people as peers. Usually they are quite known for it, as it’s rare.
Most executives in big tech are firmly in the ego-driven camp and get high on their own supply of hot air. And they really believe that everyone’s function in the company is to serve them.
Notably, there are some leaders who are very mission-driven and see their people as peers. Usually they are quite known for it, as it’s rare.
It's definitely the other way around where I work. I regularly ask the CTO (my superior) to do things I need to get work done better, and he does. The reverse is much more rare.
It's not a waste if you end up being paid. Not yours, amyway
[deleted]
I once spent six months working the hardest I've ever worked in my entire life with a mechanical engineer, two technicians, a machinist, and all of the supporting cast of procurement and scheduling to build a test fixture for a control board for a satellite.
There were four control boards per panel and four panels per satellite and a projected order of 12 satellites so were going to have over 200 boards (enough plus spares) to test and last go-around it took two days to test a single board with failures due to connector issues and I wanted to get that down to two boards per day and no failures.
It was my masterpiece. Place a board on the fixture, pull down an assembly, and six micro-D, two nano-D, MCU and FPGA programming connections, remote thermal and multimeter probes, and a canbus connection with onboard amplifier to traverse the absurdly long cable all slotted with perfect precision into the board and were routed back to a test rack via a single cable bundle. Automated test bench scripts powered on the board, took voltage measurements, programmed the devices, and ran a suite of tests automatically and then printed out a report with a signature block for me to sign at the end.
The board experienced no stress, every connector was mated with perfect force at the perfect angles, and it would cut down the amount of time needed to test the hundreds of boards we were going to build by months.
It was featured in marketing materials for my employer.
We built four of them and with all of the labor they probably cost a quarter million each but would put the program back on track as it was delayed.
Additional delays in another part of the program led to the government cancelling the entire thing and we turned over all of our tooling and prototypes to the customer who probably put my fixtures in a warehouse for fifteen years before selling them for scrap value.
There were four control boards per panel and four panels per satellite and a projected order of 12 satellites so were going to have over 200 boards (enough plus spares) to test and last go-around it took two days to test a single board with failures due to connector issues and I wanted to get that down to two boards per day and no failures.
It was my masterpiece. Place a board on the fixture, pull down an assembly, and six micro-D, two nano-D, MCU and FPGA programming connections, remote thermal and multimeter probes, and a canbus connection with onboard amplifier to traverse the absurdly long cable all slotted with perfect precision into the board and were routed back to a test rack via a single cable bundle. Automated test bench scripts powered on the board, took voltage measurements, programmed the devices, and ran a suite of tests automatically and then printed out a report with a signature block for me to sign at the end.
The board experienced no stress, every connector was mated with perfect force at the perfect angles, and it would cut down the amount of time needed to test the hundreds of boards we were going to build by months.
It was featured in marketing materials for my employer.
We built four of them and with all of the labor they probably cost a quarter million each but would put the program back on track as it was delayed.
Additional delays in another part of the program led to the government cancelling the entire thing and we turned over all of our tooling and prototypes to the customer who probably put my fixtures in a warehouse for fifteen years before selling them for scrap value.
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. (What happened to the unit tests you ask? Be quiet! Take the money)
My job was to reach deep into their system and bring the data to the surface, roughly speaking
Thing is nobody that worked on the library wanted, needed, or asked for any aspect of what were doing
The design for it was written on a whiteboard by the project lead before I joined
Then the whiteboard was cleaned.
So the design was in one man's head
That man, the project lead, quit 3 weeks before delivery
On handover day I was a bit afraid, I had taken care to keep good records of my obeying (increasingly unhinged) instructions, so I was confident I could not be blamed (I was younger and naive-not part of the story)
But I fully expected an unpleasant "you did what with our money? What were you thinking?" type of unpleasant meeting
Instead the corporate types sat around a table gushing how wonderful everything was, what a brilliant job we'd all done...
I was stunned. I understand now, I learnt that day, that it was in no-one's interest to acknowledge the waste of a million bucks
Coming from academia, as I was more or less, this was a valuable lesson.
But utterly worthless software for a million dollars
I still use some of the furniture I bought with the money....
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. (What happened to the unit tests you ask? Be quiet! Take the money)
My job was to reach deep into their system and bring the data to the surface, roughly speaking
Thing is nobody that worked on the library wanted, needed, or asked for any aspect of what were doing
The design for it was written on a whiteboard by the project lead before I joined
Then the whiteboard was cleaned.
So the design was in one man's head
That man, the project lead, quit 3 weeks before delivery
On handover day I was a bit afraid, I had taken care to keep good records of my obeying (increasingly unhinged) instructions, so I was confident I could not be blamed (I was younger and naive-not part of the story)
But I fully expected an unpleasant "you did what with our money? What were you thinking?" type of unpleasant meeting
Instead the corporate types sat around a table gushing how wonderful everything was, what a brilliant job we'd all done...
I was stunned. I understand now, I learnt that day, that it was in no-one's interest to acknowledge the waste of a million bucks
Coming from academia, as I was more or less, this was a valuable lesson.
But utterly worthless software for a million dollars
I still use some of the furniture I bought with the money....
There are multi-million dollar projects churned out and abandoned multiple times per day. Very common.
I just left a company where I was contracting with a few other people for about a year. About $1.2MM down the drain. There is no hope of spinning that product up. The owners "suspended" the project and the entire brain trust evaporated. Imagine the bank owners from the movie Mary Poppins interfacing with technologists and startup founders. Whoosh...
I just left a company where I was contracting with a few other people for about a year. About $1.2MM down the drain. There is no hope of spinning that product up. The owners "suspended" the project and the entire brain trust evaporated. Imagine the bank owners from the movie Mary Poppins interfacing with technologists and startup founders. Whoosh...
> Coming from academia, as I was more or less, this was a valuable lesson.
Academia, where there is a reasonable budget but it’s completely impossible to spend is as the cycle of meetings, emails and fucking around is eternal.
Academia, where there is a reasonable budget but it’s completely impossible to spend is as the cycle of meetings, emails and fucking around is eternal.
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 scrolled their photos and chosen message, and showed the "EnGUAGEment" as a percent of total employees responding on a car dashboard style guage. It hovered around 30-40% every day. On the CEO's birthday they'd drive that baby up to 70 to 80%
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 I should just select a higher value and a few months later, my manager said that I didn't need to use that system any more.
The funny thing is that in my current job, they use something called "Dailybot" or something integrated to google chat where you check-in and once a week, give an emoji between 1-5 about my productivity or something... Unhappy face for me.
What value is this supposed to provide? If you take part, it will be 8-9-10 regardless to "look good" and if you don't take part like me, it drags the entire team to an average of 4-5-6 which is the same as not having the system at all and yields the real outcome of average.
The funny thing is that in my current job, they use something called "Dailybot" or something integrated to google chat where you check-in and once a week, give an emoji between 1-5 about my productivity or something... Unhappy face for me.
What value is this supposed to provide? If you take part, it will be 8-9-10 regardless to "look good" and if you don't take part like me, it drags the entire team to an average of 4-5-6 which is the same as not having the system at all and yields the real outcome of average.
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.
I laughed out loud in my office reading the dilbert strip line. Thanks for the giggle, that’s a new one for me lol
This is how Russian democracy works. Like in your job, there's a scale of punishment for non-compliance, and the ultimate is being sent to the Gulags instead of getting fired.
Almost everybody knows its BS but nobody is able to mention it
Almost everybody knows its BS but nobody is able to mention it
The job is to provide 8-9-10 to put on spreadsheets and PowerPoints somewhere.
In other word pointless. The only time you can even halfheartedly trust the results is when the peoples surveyed are almost adversarial- like customers.
In other word pointless. The only time you can even halfheartedly trust the results is when the peoples surveyed are almost adversarial- like customers.
This is what happens when you invite HR to an OKR meeting.
Probably unpopular opinion: Silly excercises like this are a good way to see who bends the knee and who is a maverick, and projects only work when most people are docile enough to go with the flow and follow orders. Identifying people that make waves and evaluating if they're worth the hassle is an important part of running a successful business.
This is often sad and depressing, but sometimes it's just about doing your job, and getting some good food after work to counterbalance the bullshit.
This is often sad and depressing, but sometimes it's just about doing your job, and getting some good food after work to counterbalance the bullshit.
You are probably correct but I hate what you wrote. I hate that humans are treated this way by businesses in order to eke out a few more measly percent profit.
Poorly run businesses need docile, dishonest employees who won't point out how badly the business is run, so that it can continue circling the toilet for as long as possible.
Lean, well-run businesses rely on people who are sharp and willing to search out problems in need of fixing. This is necessary for real innovation and competence.
You see this pattern not just in business, but it all kinds of situations. For example, governments that harshly suppress their populations' speech gradually turn into economic backwaters (requiring them to suppress even harder and harder to stay afloat), while governments that foster the exchange of ideas and roll with the punches become the world's economic and geopolitical kingpins.
Lean, well-run businesses rely on people who are sharp and willing to search out problems in need of fixing. This is necessary for real innovation and competence.
You see this pattern not just in business, but it all kinds of situations. For example, governments that harshly suppress their populations' speech gradually turn into economic backwaters (requiring them to suppress even harder and harder to stay afloat), while governments that foster the exchange of ideas and roll with the punches become the world's economic and geopolitical kingpins.
Sadly, this way a company also gets rid of people who can speak uncomfortable truths when the need arises. Long-term only the desperate and the spittle lickers persist.
If management is unable to deal with people that rock the boat (as in firing should there be actual problems) then they seriously lack backbone and leadership qualities since spouting corporate propaganda and playing silly conformance games with employees is probably all they can do.
If management is unable to deal with people that rock the boat (as in firing should there be actual problems) then they seriously lack backbone and leadership qualities since spouting corporate propaganda and playing silly conformance games with employees is probably all they can do.
So you refused to participate in the data collection effort and then you question what value it is supposed to provide?
I understand if the data is not used or is used to falsely claim high employee satisfaction, but nothing you've said suggested these systems didn't start out as good faith efforts on the part of the company to track and improve employee job satisfaction.
I don't see how your behavior isn't just childish insubordination.
I understand if the data is not used or is used to falsely claim high employee satisfaction, but nothing you've said suggested these systems didn't start out as good faith efforts on the part of the company to track and improve employee job satisfaction.
I don't see how your behavior isn't just childish insubordination.
Every employee answering that would have been lying and faking their numbers, most of them to try not to get into trouble or get a black mark on their name. This person just made it clear that their answers were fake and called attention to how unreliable the whole thing was. That is admirable; bad metrics SHOULD to have attention called to them.
A couple of the places I have worked at they would hire an outside firm to conduct these type of surveys and they would anonymize the feedback. I saw the reports provided to some of the managers and the feedback in certain areas was clearly unvarnished. Now whether it lead to any meaningful change, that’s hard to quantify. I guess if you did them multiple times per year for several years you could start to establish a trend.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
I once worked for a consultancy that had something similar, and tied those satisfaction metrics to quarterly bonuses, so they were guaranteed to be inflated.
I have a terrible urge to build an automated version of this with computer vision and give it the name "EnGuAgEmEnT MeTeR"
Please spell it correctly, though, as it's "engaugement".
Is "guage" some sort of joke that I don't get or just a misspelling?
It's a misspelling of "gauge", judging by "on a car dashboard style guage". Was pretty confused up to that point.
Maybe it’s some sort of in joke for the company. At least, that’s how I took it— alongside it being an obvious reference to a speedometer. My intuition was that maybe the company’s name was “gauge”, or better yet the CEO’s name was gauge. I really hope it was the latter. Makes me think of Hooli from Silicon Valley for some reason lol
The more experience I get working in corporate environments the more I hate the letters CEO and HR. Truly some of the wackest people in these positions.
This is the funniest thing I think I've read all day.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Bill Lumbergh approves of this!
This is a joke right?
For me, more money == more motivation, nothing else
This was a publicly traded SaaS company.
After acquisition - we were handed down the order to migrate to AWS.
This was after (in the mess of the merger) the colo contracts were basically ignored and not renewed. Once someone within the company realized the issue, it was the 11th hour.
After many, many attempts to discuss our (Operations team) concerns, we abandoned our protests. It was clear the new CTO wouldn't cave and sign the contract.
Some superficial testing was conducted and the order came down to move...NOW.
We began moving hundreds (maybe thousands) of very resource hungry DB servers first (there was no way to use something like RDS without major app/config changes).
Once the AWS bill came in, the CFO blew their lid and within 90 days we were migrating BACK to our DCs (and the millions of dollars of hardware we left idling).
After acquisition - we were handed down the order to migrate to AWS.
This was after (in the mess of the merger) the colo contracts were basically ignored and not renewed. Once someone within the company realized the issue, it was the 11th hour.
After many, many attempts to discuss our (Operations team) concerns, we abandoned our protests. It was clear the new CTO wouldn't cave and sign the contract.
Some superficial testing was conducted and the order came down to move...NOW.
We began moving hundreds (maybe thousands) of very resource hungry DB servers first (there was no way to use something like RDS without major app/config changes).
Once the AWS bill came in, the CFO blew their lid and within 90 days we were migrating BACK to our DCs (and the millions of dollars of hardware we left idling).
Versions of this story are pretty common out there. People migrate to cloud because The Cloud and think they're going to save money, get extreme sticker shock, and migrate back... if they can. Sometimes they get locked in and are sort of stuck.
Sounds like a company that later migrated to Google Cloud
After the first lecture of my first programming course in college, I went to the Professor Tewksbury and started to tell him about a simulator I was writing to help other students check their work.
He holds up his hand to stop me speaking, says “you have an A. Don’t come to class anymore.”
So, I never went to class or did any of the assigned work, instead working on the simulator in my dormroom. At the end of the term I got a failing mark. I went to Tewksbury, and he had no recollection of having told me that I shouldn’t come to class. I tried explaining myself about the simulator, and showed him. He grudgingly agreed to change my mark, seeming suspicious.
Despite my attempts to work with the dept, the simulator never got used.
He holds up his hand to stop me speaking, says “you have an A. Don’t come to class anymore.”
So, I never went to class or did any of the assigned work, instead working on the simulator in my dormroom. At the end of the term I got a failing mark. I went to Tewksbury, and he had no recollection of having told me that I shouldn’t come to class. I tried explaining myself about the simulator, and showed him. He grudgingly agreed to change my mark, seeming suspicious.
Despite my attempts to work with the dept, the simulator never got used.
During my tenure in college, had a professor that would write 10s or 100s of line of code to do things that could literally be done in one or two.
Pointed this out to him a couple of times, not that I had been a dev for 15 years at this point. Everytime he squashed anything I said.
Comes to end of semester project. Within 24 hours of him handing it out, myself and team handed in final solution, which absolutely worked and fulfilled all requirements.
We all got a not completed at final grade. Found out later that only 3 people in the class got an A, and they were the only females in the class, everyone else got a not completed. Immediately after having a convo with the "professor" and the threat of convo with dean of students, suddenly everyone got a passing grade.
What a piece of human garbage.
I tried to place out of an intro-to-programming course in a back-to-school bout of scholastic achievement. I wasn't allowed to test out of it despite the coursewor being rote and that anyone with 2 seconds looking at my CV could see I did not need it. Anyway - they released the assignments on day 1. I turned them in on day 2. I still had to go to class. Stupid.
My "filesystems and database design" class was basically howto use mysql. It's a shame, I was more interested in actual file system and database design
Just stupid stuff like that made me drop the academic bullshit and skip into the real world.
My "filesystems and database design" class was basically howto use mysql. It's a shame, I was more interested in actual file system and database design
Just stupid stuff like that made me drop the academic bullshit and skip into the real world.
It’s hard to say with this little information, but it sounds like you might have chosen the wrong school for your goals?
The database class at my uni was mostly relational algebra. Likewise, many other classes were mostly foundational theory (though we did have project-based applicative classes too).
The database class at my uni was mostly relational algebra. Likewise, many other classes were mostly foundational theory (though we did have project-based applicative classes too).
It was the closest reasonably priced state school near to my home thst took transfer credits from my community College. I should have gone for copywriting
The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3 twice so I don't think they were unacademic
The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3 twice so I don't think they were unacademic
> The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3 twice so I don't think they were unacademic
This failure also may be a sign that it was the wrong school. A course taught badly or indifferently can make a subject tedious or difficult, that when taught well is exciting and easy.
This failure also may be a sign that it was the wrong school. A course taught badly or indifferently can make a subject tedious or difficult, that when taught well is exciting and easy.
I loved my math prof, I just suck at math. I took him twice.
I took a database design class in college. I had been using MySQL for years at this point (by no means an expert, but databases weren’t foreign to me).
In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries right (don’t get me started on programming/writing queries on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn’t put a semicolon at the end of my query. Something I had never done in any database tool, never done in my code, and only done 1-2 times on the CLI if that.
IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places. Teaching things 10+ years out of date by people who have a chip on this shoulder towards anything new. I had an EE professor who literally did not go a single class without find some way to denigrate web developers and “not real developers”. Fun times.
In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries right (don’t get me started on programming/writing queries on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn’t put a semicolon at the end of my query. Something I had never done in any database tool, never done in my code, and only done 1-2 times on the CLI if that.
IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places. Teaching things 10+ years out of date by people who have a chip on this shoulder towards anything new. I had an EE professor who literally did not go a single class without find some way to denigrate web developers and “not real developers”. Fun times.
It's been a while since I've touched SQP, and most of my experience is with psql, but as far as I can recall if you type commands into the psql console without a semicolon the commands don't get executed properly?
Still a dumb reason to deduct points though
Still a dumb reason to deduct points though
You are correct, on the command line you need it but pretty much every GUI tool and language binding auto-add it for you. It felt very nit-picky and not at all based in reality. I got all the joins/limits/order/where/etc correct, the semicolon doesn’t matter for what I felt the test should be actually testing on. Testing human’s ability to memorize or write perfect syntax when they will never do that unaided in reality is just silly.
One of my professors would mark us down for each line of code that is over 80 characters.
What it really was was a forcing function to figure out auto formatting tools, so in the end I didn't mind.
What it really was was a forcing function to figure out auto formatting tools, so in the end I didn't mind.
> 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...
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...
The incompatible library and overly expensive computer recommendations aside, CS is full of things "you literally never use". It's a theoretical discipline more akin to mathematics than anything else, and it certainly isn't software engineering, to the surprise of many students (including me, when I was one).
Outside of my university coursework, I have never used the Pumping Lemma (Theory of Computation), balanced a red-black tree (Algorithms & Data Structures), relational algebra (Databases), and all sorts of other things that someone focused on the software development aspect of computers would literally never use and would wonder why we're focusing so much on these things.
Outside of my university coursework, I have never used the Pumping Lemma (Theory of Computation), balanced a red-black tree (Algorithms & Data Structures), relational algebra (Databases), and all sorts of other things that someone focused on the software development aspect of computers would literally never use and would wonder why we're focusing so much on these things.
Stuff like this makes me angry. I had similar experiences in uni.
I grew up very poor, so finishing uni was like, an achievement I had to do, but I learnt C++ and HL2 modding and other computer stuff back in highschool.
My uni experience was 7 years of hell (multiple gap years to go do real work before coming back). Getting stuff like "pseudocode can't have an equal sign in it, so NC" on assignments.
"Even if you finish all the assignments you must attend every tutorial or you pass"
Ive told many academics to go to hell. I'm not paid to be there like they are.
My grades go from "barely passed" to "high distinction" like a rollercoaster each year.
- and yet, I still really wanted to like uni. I do still want to like it, it's just a shame about the academics
I grew up very poor, so finishing uni was like, an achievement I had to do, but I learnt C++ and HL2 modding and other computer stuff back in highschool.
My uni experience was 7 years of hell (multiple gap years to go do real work before coming back). Getting stuff like "pseudocode can't have an equal sign in it, so NC" on assignments.
"Even if you finish all the assignments you must attend every tutorial or you pass"
Ive told many academics to go to hell. I'm not paid to be there like they are.
My grades go from "barely passed" to "high distinction" like a rollercoaster each year.
- and yet, I still really wanted to like uni. I do still want to like it, it's just a shame about the academics
When I had BS classes that required attendance, I'd just sit reading a book. Teacher doesn't respect me, I don't respect them. Screw em.
Completing university is the most useless project I've worked on.
Completing university is the most useless project I've worked on.
Awesome story, and a good lesson in "always get it in writing"
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 weekend and told me to "ensure not work over 40hrs" this week. This is an impossibility, I had been working late all week and was already at 45 or 50hrs for the week, and I still had Friday/Saturday/Sunday to go.
So after the discussion, I sent him an email, casual, saying I've cancelled my flight back home for the weekend, confirming i'll be onsite all weekend and that I'd ensure to "only log 40hrs this week".
He came by my desk furious and said if I "ever pulled a stunt like that again there would be consequences"
So I re-plied to the original email, took him off, put on my personal gmail and just recounted the entire episode and sent the email again.
My boss came by one Friday morning and informed me i'd be onsite working all weekend and told me to "ensure not work over 40hrs" this week. This is an impossibility, I had been working late all week and was already at 45 or 50hrs for the week, and I still had Friday/Saturday/Sunday to go.
So after the discussion, I sent him an email, casual, saying I've cancelled my flight back home for the weekend, confirming i'll be onsite all weekend and that I'd ensure to "only log 40hrs this week".
He came by my desk furious and said if I "ever pulled a stunt like that again there would be consequences"
So I re-plied to the original email, took him off, put on my personal gmail and just recounted the entire episode and sent the email again.
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 something.
It was a great story until that point and I want to know what happened next, I feel I’m missing something.
He was creating a paper trail for illegal working/billing practices.
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.
> 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.
The stunt is creating a paper trail.
The concept seems weird to me. I have never been given a mark by a teacher that matters. Exams were administered by independent bodies.
In the UK that’s the case through high school and college (UK definition, 16-18) but at university the exams and coursework are graded by the lecturer/professor. So that’s likely what happened here.
Yes, academic administration is different in different countries. In the US it's especially criticized for its subjectivity, here which we have a great example of.
[deleted]
Was this at Stevens Tech? I had a Prof Tewksbury there that would have done something just like this.
The very same! It was the intro to compsci for engineers that paired with the robot project… c 2007.
Another kind of sad Tewks story is, once I went to see him in his office, and I witnessed him giving a grad student and early edition copy of a Claude Shanon tome. Clearly was intended as a nice gift. The grad student didn’t get it, and Tewks had to explain who Shanon was to a EE PhD candidate. I wanted to jump up and down and get his attention but I was just that pesky undergraduate with some scheme to get a free A…
Anyways he was a Bell Labs guy and full of lore and wisdom, but I would have loved to have known him as a younger man. Same with Harold Stalwen.
I did have the great honor of taking courses with Roger Pinkham and Norman J Morgenstein Horing who despite both being in their 80s were possessed of incredible intellect and didactic powers. Pinkham in particular was the closest I’ve ever come to meeting Gandalf.
Another kind of sad Tewks story is, once I went to see him in his office, and I witnessed him giving a grad student and early edition copy of a Claude Shanon tome. Clearly was intended as a nice gift. The grad student didn’t get it, and Tewks had to explain who Shanon was to a EE PhD candidate. I wanted to jump up and down and get his attention but I was just that pesky undergraduate with some scheme to get a free A…
Anyways he was a Bell Labs guy and full of lore and wisdom, but I would have loved to have known him as a younger man. Same with Harold Stalwen.
I did have the great honor of taking courses with Roger Pinkham and Norman J Morgenstein Horing who despite both being in their 80s were possessed of incredible intellect and didactic powers. Pinkham in particular was the closest I’ve ever come to meeting Gandalf.
It was obviously a joke you didn't get
It's actually pretty unfortunate if they heard that, didn't get confirmation, and just stopped going to class.
Yeah it's actually a little terrifying, almost a lack of survival instinct
You may very well be right. (TBH this possibility had never crossed my mind till your comment.) I prefer to Assume Positive Intent even at the risk of being the butt of a sardonic joke.
Not so concise, but I've done this (kinda). I did give a presentation to the class later in the semester about a practical implementation of things they worked on all semester though.
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 review listed its function as their absolute last priority. I am not sure whether there's been a change in management, or some salesperson talked really fast, or what.
I am trying to appreciate this as 'salary for nothing' and use the time to study for other things but it turns out that for me this is an anxiety-inducing and unhappy experience.
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 review listed its function as their absolute last priority. I am not sure whether there's been a change in management, or some salesperson talked really fast, or what.
I am trying to appreciate this as 'salary for nothing' and use the time to study for other things but it turns out that for me this is an anxiety-inducing and unhappy experience.
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.
This reduces to a belief, which I also hold, that you have inherent worth.
It's like Bret Victor's story of Puddles. Imagine you adopt a puppy. You name him Puddles. You take puddles home and you give them a little snack and you stick puddles in the cage and you lock the door forever and never open it again. Most, although not all, would agree this is cruel.
We have a notion of what it means to live a full doggy life. Dogs have to run around. They sniff other dogs and they pee on things. That's kind of what it means to be a dog. Dogs have a set of capabilities and we recognize that a dog has to be allowed the full free expression of its entire range of capabilities in order to be a dog.
The same is true for people. Like a dog needs to hunt, people seek meaning. They wither away without it.
https://vimeo.com/115154289
It's like Bret Victor's story of Puddles. Imagine you adopt a puppy. You name him Puddles. You take puddles home and you give them a little snack and you stick puddles in the cage and you lock the door forever and never open it again. Most, although not all, would agree this is cruel.
We have a notion of what it means to live a full doggy life. Dogs have to run around. They sniff other dogs and they pee on things. That's kind of what it means to be a dog. Dogs have a set of capabilities and we recognize that a dog has to be allowed the full free expression of its entire range of capabilities in order to be a dog.
The same is true for people. Like a dog needs to hunt, people seek meaning. They wither away without it.
https://vimeo.com/115154289
This is quite a humble take on definition of value, I like it.
A consulting firm I worked with had great sales people.
They could get software consultants anywhere, especially where they were not needed.
A former colleague of mine got assigned along another to assist an Italian bank with their software projects.
He told me that in his office there were 6/8 people, barely doing any work. Two of them were leads in that office and did their best to never ever be seen or meet anyone. They would just close themselves in the office the whole day doing god knows what. If you knocked they would pretend to not be there.
My colleagues tried to get some work to do desperately for months, but consultancy said to shut up because the contract was huge.
He says it was one of the most miserable periods of his life because "there's enough Youtube a person can watch for 18 months" and there were more than 2 hours per day of commuting on top of that.
They could get software consultants anywhere, especially where they were not needed.
A former colleague of mine got assigned along another to assist an Italian bank with their software projects.
He told me that in his office there were 6/8 people, barely doing any work. Two of them were leads in that office and did their best to never ever be seen or meet anyone. They would just close themselves in the office the whole day doing god knows what. If you knocked they would pretend to not be there.
My colleagues tried to get some work to do desperately for months, but consultancy said to shut up because the contract was huge.
He says it was one of the most miserable periods of his life because "there's enough Youtube a person can watch for 18 months" and there were more than 2 hours per day of commuting on top of that.
I can attest to this phenomenon too.
I have had this job before.
You have two choices.
1. Start a side gig. Be busy at work make extra money.
2. Work on open source. Find a project you like or want to work on and do that.
PS: set up a home lab and learn to love SSH tunnels.
You have two choices.
1. Start a side gig. Be busy at work make extra money.
2. Work on open source. Find a project you like or want to work on and do that.
PS: set up a home lab and learn to love SSH tunnels.
You cannot legally do 1 or 2. They'd both belong to the company because ip work laws
That purely depends on jurisdiction (country, there is no world universal law) and your contract. A lot of companies smuggle that in a contract, often they’re happy to drop these kind of clauses.
Depends on the country.
Another alternative is to become actually useful in that spare time.
Doing what depends on the business - it can take some detective work to figure it out.
Then again, the detective work could quickly show this is someplace you don't want to be long-term.
In which case yeah, find something productive to do, or treat this as that paid learning time to build some new skills.
Best part of learning is test it's defensible ... "oh, I'm busy doing an assessment on the pros and cons of rewriting the system using node.js. "
Doing what depends on the business - it can take some detective work to figure it out.
Then again, the detective work could quickly show this is someplace you don't want to be long-term.
In which case yeah, find something productive to do, or treat this as that paid learning time to build some new skills.
Best part of learning is test it's defensible ... "oh, I'm busy doing an assessment on the pros and cons of rewriting the system using node.js. "
> for me this is an anxiety-inducing and unhappy experience.
Don't measure yourself by goofy corporate politics. It's not your fault (and ignore their political blame games). You can make the world a better place by the pay you are receiving.
Don't measure yourself by goofy corporate politics. It's not your fault (and ignore their political blame games). You can make the world a better place by the pay you are receiving.
Get another job or use the money for counselling / therapy, your mental health is more important than the job.
Hell, maybe try work two jobs if you can!
Hell, maybe try work two jobs if you can!
I was a new hire at a game development company. My first task was to optimize a function that was consuming more cycles than all the other ones. The function was responsible for dispatching Objective-C++ method calls.
After a quick debug session, the problem was clear: the methods to call was being searched using a linear search. I changed the search to use a hashtable and the function disappeared from the list of most CPU consuming functions.
After running both implementations for a couple of weeks to make sure my implementation was right, I made a PR, which wasn't approved. The manager said my change was too risky to go to production, even though the implementation was simple and I spent two weeks making sure it was ok. They're probably still using the linear search.
After a quick debug session, the problem was clear: the methods to call was being searched using a linear search. I changed the search to use a hashtable and the function disappeared from the list of most CPU consuming functions.
After running both implementations for a couple of weeks to make sure my implementation was right, I made a PR, which wasn't approved. The manager said my change was too risky to go to production, even though the implementation was simple and I spent two weeks making sure it was ok. They're probably still using the linear search.
Oh wow, I had a virtually identical experience.
I was a junior programmer helping out with a Java applet game that ran in the browser. It had performance issues, which I narrowed down to a “ticker tape” text animation. The position of the text in pixels was being updated by a background thread, and that thread would leak each time when the user switched screens. If you clicked around enough there would be hundreds of threads all updating the same shared variable.
I replaced a thousand lines of that nonsense with a single line of code:
I got in trouble for “making a mess”. The developer responsible for the previous code had been busy (for weeks!) “fixing” this code and couldn’t merge his change. So it got reverted and they spent another month tuning the threaded code for better performance.
I waited until they got distracted and gave up, then re-merged my one-liner. They were convinced they had “fixed it” and never looked at that code again.
The responsible coder got a pat on the back for his hard work and I got a disciplinary meeting to discuss my “behaviour”.
This was at a startup that burned through ten million dollars and then was shuttered because the software was basically garbage and couldn’t be sold to anyone.
I was a junior programmer helping out with a Java applet game that ran in the browser. It had performance issues, which I narrowed down to a “ticker tape” text animation. The position of the text in pixels was being updated by a background thread, and that thread would leak each time when the user switched screens. If you clicked around enough there would be hundreds of threads all updating the same shared variable.
I replaced a thousand lines of that nonsense with a single line of code:
return getTicks() * velocity % tickerWidth;
I got in trouble for “making a mess”. The developer responsible for the previous code had been busy (for weeks!) “fixing” this code and couldn’t merge his change. So it got reverted and they spent another month tuning the threaded code for better performance.
I waited until they got distracted and gave up, then re-merged my one-liner. They were convinced they had “fixed it” and never looked at that code again.
The responsible coder got a pat on the back for his hard work and I got a disciplinary meeting to discuss my “behaviour”.
This was at a startup that burned through ten million dollars and then was shuttered because the software was basically garbage and couldn’t be sold to anyone.
I hope you ran away from that company. Your change was too disruptive, because it made other people look stupid, like they didn't grok basic data structures. I think everyone overlooks obvious solutions to everyday problems every now and then, but the way they reacted speaks volumes...
I actually think it’s worse.
Even insecure people will take better code in most circumstances. Maybe after adding their own touches to it so it doesn’t seem like you got it right or came up with a good solution on your own.
It’s the ones that don’t understand the change and don’t want to admit it that are the real problem. “Too disruptive = I don’t understand this and don’t know how to support it”, if, in fact, it was a simple search->hash map change which any developer should be able to grok.
Even insecure people will take better code in most circumstances. Maybe after adding their own touches to it so it doesn’t seem like you got it right or came up with a good solution on your own.
It’s the ones that don’t understand the change and don’t want to admit it that are the real problem. “Too disruptive = I don’t understand this and don’t know how to support it”, if, in fact, it was a simple search->hash map change which any developer should be able to grok.
I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online. It's way better than any other available option.
I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle.
I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle.
I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
Go out with a bang. Release it, enjoy your 15 minutes in the spotlight, and when the lawyers come a-knocking, shut it down. Or make it open source and let the community take the wheel and the responsibility.
You never know what opportunities this adventure might bring, but certainly more than just keeping it on your hard drive. Go for it mate.
You never know what opportunities this adventure might bring, but certainly more than just keeping it on your hard drive. Go for it mate.
I may indeed do this. There is an outstanding issue I have to address that I've never quite worked up the motivation to deal with:
Heroku restarts their servers once every 24 hours with only thirty seconds' warning. Since the games are in-memory, this of course kicks everyone out of whatever games they may be in the middle of.
I guess the solution is to have the games be on Redis instead of in-memory? I'm a bit more front-end oriented so I was bewildered to learn this was how it worked in the first place and I'm not 100% confident in my solution.
Heroku restarts their servers once every 24 hours with only thirty seconds' warning. Since the games are in-memory, this of course kicks everyone out of whatever games they may be in the middle of.
I guess the solution is to have the games be on Redis instead of in-memory? I'm a bit more front-end oriented so I was bewildered to learn this was how it worked in the first place and I'm not 100% confident in my solution.
The quickest win would to move off of Heroku. Either rent your own server that you can control (to a reasonable degree), or find an alternative that doesn't suffer that issue.
Redis would work but I'd be afraid of race conditions. There probably wouldn't be any, but it's something to be aware of.
If you wanted to test the waters with at least the relative public, I'd consider doing step 1 of renting a server, but then hiding it behind a Tor hidden service. Inconvenient to connect to? Yeah. (Probably) safe from the Hasbro demons? Also yeah.
Redis would work but I'd be afraid of race conditions. There probably wouldn't be any, but it's something to be aware of.
If you wanted to test the waters with at least the relative public, I'd consider doing step 1 of renting a server, but then hiding it behind a Tor hidden service. Inconvenient to connect to? Yeah. (Probably) safe from the Hasbro demons? Also yeah.
Linode is super cheap. I pay 6 or 7 bucks a month for a bottom tier VM.
I guess I just haven't done anything outside of a PaaS before and I'm a bit worried about unknown unknowns. I'm sure I'm probably up to the task but managing my own server is just new ground for me. I'll have to research how to ensure that the server is always up or recovers from an unexpected failure and restarts immediately.
Fly.io would probably work for your use case. Doesn't have the restart limit of Heroku and still has a solid enough free tier to run your app!
I'd be happy to help if you need anything! Whether hosting or just backend related questions!
Also depending on how hard coded your architecture is, maybe you can separate out the Magic specific data from the app itself? So the MTG specific data could just be loaded as a datapack?
I'd be happy to help if you need anything! Whether hosting or just backend related questions!
Also depending on how hard coded your architecture is, maybe you can separate out the Magic specific data from the app itself? So the MTG specific data could just be loaded as a datapack?
You can also split the difference and run Dokku[0] on a vps and basically host your own instance of “Heroku”. It can even use the same build packs and procfiles.
Feel free to message me and I’d be happy to help with server stuff.
[0] https://dokku.com/
Feel free to message me and I’d be happy to help with server stuff.
[0] https://dokku.com/
Render (render.com; I'm the founder) doesn't restart your server every 24 hours like Heroku; it does restart it automatically if it crashes.
I would second the recommendation to move off Heroku. They're essentially the smallest scale version of vendor lock-in out there nowadays, especially considering they're no longer free.
An open-sourced codedump will survive best if people (which effectively means "average technically-minded MTG player" in this case) can run it wherever they're most comfortable - which will almost certainly be something that smells like a VPS. Mayyybe a container.
An open-sourced codedump will survive best if people (which effectively means "average technically-minded MTG player" in this case) can run it wherever they're most comfortable - which will almost certainly be something that smells like a VPS. Mayyybe a container.
On restart warning, take server state (sign/encrypt if you want to) and dump it to each players' clients.
If both players are still connected once the server comes up and client reconnects, both players can send state to server and if both players' global states match then the game resumes, if not then error out. If only one player reconnects cause the other couldn't wait & closed tab, then you gotta error out anyways.
Then you don't need Redis or any other additional dep at least.
If both players are still connected once the server comes up and client reconnects, both players can send state to server and if both players' global states match then the game resumes, if not then error out. If only one player reconnects cause the other couldn't wait & closed tab, then you gotta error out anyways.
Then you don't need Redis or any other additional dep at least.
Architect a redundant cluster and let a peer server take over as master?
Is using a host that doesn't do this not a possibility?
Data persistence is a solved problem. “Server that never fails or reboots” is not.
It seems they all do, though. Digital ocean was the same.
Any decent VPS provider (including DigitalOcean, unless they’ve changed anything) definitely doesn’t do this.
Maybe you're right, I may be mistaken. Perhaps I should migrate to DO.
Actually, I should qualify this.
If you use a PaaS (platform as a service, e.g. Heroku, DO App Platform, AWS EB), they might assume your app to be stateless and do things like restart it at will.
If you use a VPS (virtual private server, e.g. DO Droplet, AWS EC2), this certainly shouldn’t happen, but of course it requires some Linux skills to maintain your VPS.
So it’s basically a trade-off between engineering your app to fit a PaaS or hand-managing your VMs (though the latter is usually the cheaper option).
If you use a PaaS (platform as a service, e.g. Heroku, DO App Platform, AWS EB), they might assume your app to be stateless and do things like restart it at will.
If you use a VPS (virtual private server, e.g. DO Droplet, AWS EC2), this certainly shouldn’t happen, but of course it requires some Linux skills to maintain your VPS.
So it’s basically a trade-off between engineering your app to fit a PaaS or hand-managing your VMs (though the latter is usually the cheaper option).
Yeah, indeed. I can try using a Droplet but I'm just new to managing a VM by hand. I've always used a PaaS for my projects so ensuring uptime and whatever other responsibilities there may be is new for me.
If that’s the case I’d suggest you probably have a bug in your code somewhere that depends on a timer that resets at midnight. So when it spans midnight everything resets, but this isn’t the server resetting.
Off topic, but I recently looked in to playing MtG again because my son expressed interest. But, I was a bit taken aback by how different the environment is. I last played when they still had numbered "base sets", e.g., "9th Edition", and then rotating "blocks" of three smaller-but-more-advanced sets.
I was assuming I would go in and buy a couple of starter decks from the most recent numbered "edition" to start teaching him, but it appears that they don't do this anymore, and everything I saw was focused around the "Commander" format, which has even more mechanics and rules. The game was already complex enough that I was worried about teaching it to someone new (Plus, the commander mechanic didn't appeal to me, personally, anyway).
Is there no longer the concept of a "simple base set" with just the basic mechanics? Or is everything just theme-heavy sets now?
I was assuming I would go in and buy a couple of starter decks from the most recent numbered "edition" to start teaching him, but it appears that they don't do this anymore, and everything I saw was focused around the "Commander" format, which has even more mechanics and rules. The game was already complex enough that I was worried about teaching it to someone new (Plus, the commander mechanic didn't appeal to me, personally, anyway).
Is there no longer the concept of a "simple base set" with just the basic mechanics? Or is everything just theme-heavy sets now?
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 time, you could just craft a starter deck on paper or find a list online, and then order the individual cards from a website. As long as you avoid the must-have cards for competitive players, it'll be cheap.
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 time, you could just craft a starter deck on paper or find a list online, and then order the individual cards from a website. As long as you avoid the must-have cards for competitive players, it'll be cheap.
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
See also: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Core_set
I recently got into it with my son. I bought an arena starter kit from Amazon and it came with two 60-card decks, which seemed to work pretty well in play against each other. I bought another one long – same result. No focus on the commander format at all. I would suggest that route.
As someone mentioned - the "Arena Starter Kits" worked for us as an intro to the game.
The basic rules around commander aren't particularly additionally taxing beyond that. (This is your special card that you can play every time. When it dies it goes back to its special spot and it gets more expensive each time you cast it). What I like about the commander format (in the few pre-constructed decks I've bought over the last few years) - they can really lean into a theme/strategy more - and the commander really guides you in how to play this deck.
Start with those arena kits - they are cheap and handle the rules. But if your son sees a commander deck that resonates with him (in theme or mechanics) -- I'd recommend giving it a shot.
The basic rules around commander aren't particularly additionally taxing beyond that. (This is your special card that you can play every time. When it dies it goes back to its special spot and it gets more expensive each time you cast it). What I like about the commander format (in the few pre-constructed decks I've bought over the last few years) - they can really lean into a theme/strategy more - and the commander really guides you in how to play this deck.
Start with those arena kits - they are cheap and handle the rules. But if your son sees a commander deck that resonates with him (in theme or mechanics) -- I'd recommend giving it a shot.
Magic has changed drastically the last few years. I tried to get back into it and the best set I found was Jump Start 2022.
Alternatively, Star Wars Unlimited just released their first set. The starter set has two balanced decks (Vader vs Luke) with some staple cards that can be used in a bunch of different decks with boosters. Gameplay is Magic-esque, but smoothed out (no land issues since any card can be turned into a resource, no instants/stack shenanigans, and actions pass back and forth so constant engagement).
There's a free to play version at https://www.forcetable.net/swu using the starter decks.
Alternatively, Star Wars Unlimited just released their first set. The starter set has two balanced decks (Vader vs Luke) with some staple cards that can be used in a bunch of different decks with boosters. Gameplay is Magic-esque, but smoothed out (no land issues since any card can be turned into a resource, no instants/stack shenanigans, and actions pass back and forth so constant engagement).
There's a free to play version at https://www.forcetable.net/swu using the starter decks.
Play premodern. In addition to having the best gameplay, the card pool is closed so you don't have to worry about acquiring new cards.
https://premodernmagic.com
https://premodernmagic.com
Fun fact, Commander was a fan-made format that WotC eventually adopted and made official. It existed (even under that name despite what people online say now) in the mid/late 2000s when I learned of it during college.
Indeed, things have changed about a year ago.
Here is a small blogpost by WotC: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/revitalizing...
Here is a small blogpost by WotC: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/revitalizing...
I’ve been playing with my son, but using my shoebox full of old cards, many with an “IV” logo so must have been around 4e that I was playing back in the day.
The game is complex, but a good intellectual challenge for a bright 6yo reader.
The game is complex, but a good intellectual challenge for a bright 6yo reader.
Probably VI; 4th edition didn't have a set symbol.
Right.
Also, FWIW, 5th edition also didn't have a set symbol, but the "Visions" set was released at around the same time and had a "V" symbol... (I only realized how confusing it was after 27 years lol...
Also, FWIW, 5th edition also didn't have a set symbol, but the "Visions" set was released at around the same time and had a "V" symbol... (I only realized how confusing it was after 27 years lol...
Alpha beta unlimited revised Arabian nights 4th edition ice age mirage etc etc. I'm sure that's all wrong but I used to know it by heart. I keep my cards in old motherboard boxes !
You could also consider games which have the mechanics of MtG without being collectible, such as Epic. It still has plenty of depth.
Isn't there a free starter deck you can get from game stores?
There are several projects that implement the MTG engine and are in active use. Forge and Xmage are the main ones. You could ask their developers how they avoid getting C&D'ed. It's definitely doable and your work doesn't have to be in vain.
OK listen up dude.
> I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online.
No you didn't! You built the best site out there for playing trading card games. It just so happens that it's very easy to point to your own local card/rule sets, share them with peers, and play together online. And if the cards/rules being used by the clients happen to be MTG cards/rules, oh well! That's out of your hands.
Seriously, if you want to release this you only need to make it a) generic out of the box, and b) completely customizable at the client level. Of course this would never support true competitive play since you can never trust the client, but it would still be super fun for playing against people you trust. And as a bonus you could support user-created cards and rules.
> I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online.
No you didn't! You built the best site out there for playing trading card games. It just so happens that it's very easy to point to your own local card/rule sets, share them with peers, and play together online. And if the cards/rules being used by the clients happen to be MTG cards/rules, oh well! That's out of your hands.
Seriously, if you want to release this you only need to make it a) generic out of the box, and b) completely customizable at the client level. Of course this would never support true competitive play since you can never trust the client, but it would still be super fun for playing against people you trust. And as a bonus you could support user-created cards and rules.
By being generic and customizable it will have the potential to become a great new game in its own right. Let the community begin with something they already know and love (MtG) and watch them coming up with cool new stuff.
The problem as I see it is loading the card data and imagery. I use scryfall for this, and it's heavily integrated into the site in several ways. I don't see how I can get around that. My site is coded specifically to work with their API. I can't really make it so you can "swap it out" for a different game's API.
Cockatrice also loads card images and card text likely from the same source
If it doesn't handle the card rules automatically for you, then it's way worse than MTG Arena or MTGO. I've played with free MTG software (cockatrice) and it's not close to the same thing, even though it has all the art and buttons for doing all the effects manually (I use this shortcut to draw 3 cards, this shortcut to put 2 back, this shortcut to exile someone's graveyard, etc).
If they really built the best site for playing MTG, even over paid versions, then there's no real way to hide the fact that it's magic-specific.
If they really built the best site for playing MTG, even over paid versions, then there's no real way to hide the fact that it's magic-specific.
I'm not competing with Arena. Arena has a rules engine and great graphics. But Arena has a tonnnn of limitations and does not let you simply "build any deck you want and play with any number of friends in any format you choose." For what Arena is meant to do, Arena is better. That was never my goal.
I'm competing with Untap.in and Cockatrice, and what I built is just a much, much nicer version of those things. If you give me your email, I'll send you a link to it and you can try it out yourself if you'd like.
I'm competing with Untap.in and Cockatrice, and what I built is just a much, much nicer version of those things. If you give me your email, I'll send you a link to it and you can try it out yourself if you'd like.
Just brainstorming, but would it be possible to pull out the MTG-specific portions and make it just an online card game framework where people can make their own cards and rules? If people choose to use it to copy MTG that's on them (see Tabletop Simulator, for example) but they might also use it to create their own new games.
The challenge is that the level of complexity with rules interactions in MtG is absolutely enormous, especially if you want to allow the freeform format, which allows all sets and cards.
Note: You can see all the rules here: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Comprehensive_Rules
Note: You can see all the rules here: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Comprehensive_Rules
Oh I didn't implement a rules engine, that would be impractical. It's a freeform platform that gives you all the tools needed to use every mechanic in the game, but it's up to you to actually follow the rules. No different from playing in person with real cards. It's sort of like a drag and drop sandbox with a lot of extra features around the edges. It's a vastly improved version of Untap.in.
If you do not implement the actual rules, then it can probably be made to support many other kind of card games too.
However, I would be interested to have a FOSS rule engine of Magic: the Gathering, preferably written in C, and licensed by AGPL3 or some compatible license. But, unfortunately there is no official FOSS implementation; if there was (at least of the rule engine; not necessarily the UI) (especially if literate programming is used for the rule engine), I think that it would be better since the rules can be made more precise.
I would want to ensure that the rule engine has no pictures at all (you can easily download pictures separately if you want them, anyways; so the rule engine doesn't need them and shouldn't have them).
However, I would be interested to have a FOSS rule engine of Magic: the Gathering, preferably written in C, and licensed by AGPL3 or some compatible license. But, unfortunately there is no official FOSS implementation; if there was (at least of the rule engine; not necessarily the UI) (especially if literate programming is used for the rule engine), I think that it would be better since the rules can be made more precise.
I would want to ensure that the rule engine has no pictures at all (you can easily download pictures separately if you want them, anyways; so the rule engine doesn't need them and shouldn't have them).
Obviously not legal advice for anyone, but the general consensus seems to be that in many countries (including the United States where WotC are based) game mechanics are not copyrightable. This interpretation has been stated publicly by the US Copyright Office: https://web.archive.org/web/20161122174519/http://www.copyri...
Obviously the name can be trademarked, and text (e.g. the names / descriptions of things, the specific expression of the rules) and images (e.g. card art) can be copyrighted.
There is a long history of clones of games with the exact same mechanics, but with everything renamed and the artwork changed.
Occasionally, there are attempts to patent mechanics.
So it wouldn't necessarily be a problem if GP was to rename the game, change all the card artwork, make sure no instructions from the original game are used in the new game, and rename all the cards and concepts in an isomorphic way (i.e. a 1:1 mapping between MtG and whatever the new game is called). That way, it could be a completely new game which happens to have the same mechanics as MtG, but isn't a derivative of it legally.
It would be possible to speculate what WoTC would do in that case, but hard to know for sure. Most likely, they'd probably just ignore it if it isn't using their trademark, artwork, descriptions and so on. They could send a blusterous C&D letter to try their luck if they were particularly worried. If the GP got such a letter and ignored it, or replied explaining that their game does not reuse any copyrightable elements, they'd probably just back down. If they really decided to take it to court, they could try to hope it goes more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spry_Fox%2C_LLC_v._Lolapps%2C_.... than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_East_USA,_Inc._v._Epyx,_I.... (although they'd probably have a harder road given Spry Fox was largely based on the visual look-and-feel, which would be a longer bow to draw when saying a computer game infringes on a card game).
Obviously, none of this is legal advice, and the circumstances could differ depending on facts like where it is hosted / where GP lives, and the exact details of the game engine or how similar artwork was.
Obviously the name can be trademarked, and text (e.g. the names / descriptions of things, the specific expression of the rules) and images (e.g. card art) can be copyrighted.
There is a long history of clones of games with the exact same mechanics, but with everything renamed and the artwork changed.
Occasionally, there are attempts to patent mechanics.
So it wouldn't necessarily be a problem if GP was to rename the game, change all the card artwork, make sure no instructions from the original game are used in the new game, and rename all the cards and concepts in an isomorphic way (i.e. a 1:1 mapping between MtG and whatever the new game is called). That way, it could be a completely new game which happens to have the same mechanics as MtG, but isn't a derivative of it legally.
It would be possible to speculate what WoTC would do in that case, but hard to know for sure. Most likely, they'd probably just ignore it if it isn't using their trademark, artwork, descriptions and so on. They could send a blusterous C&D letter to try their luck if they were particularly worried. If the GP got such a letter and ignored it, or replied explaining that their game does not reuse any copyrightable elements, they'd probably just back down. If they really decided to take it to court, they could try to hope it goes more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spry_Fox%2C_LLC_v._Lolapps%2C_.... than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_East_USA,_Inc._v._Epyx,_I.... (although they'd probably have a harder road given Spry Fox was largely based on the visual look-and-feel, which would be a longer bow to draw when saying a computer game infringes on a card game).
Obviously, none of this is legal advice, and the circumstances could differ depending on facts like where it is hosted / where GP lives, and the exact details of the game engine or how similar artwork was.
I made a website about Tintin (the Belgian comic) where you can search any cell from any album by its text content. There's also a game where you have to find which album a cell comes from.
The owners of the intellectual property wrote to me and just asked that I stop using the domain name I was using (which was the name of a character) and that every cell contains a reference to them ("Tintin is copyrighted to blah blah blah"). I obliged and haven't heard of them ever since.
The owners of the intellectual property wrote to me and just asked that I stop using the domain name I was using (which was the name of a character) and that every cell contains a reference to them ("Tintin is copyrighted to blah blah blah"). I obliged and haven't heard of them ever since.
Great blistering barnacles! That's quite a story. Would you mind posting the link to your site here? I'm very curious to see it.
Sure, it's https://www.ectoplasme.com/
(It's in French, should have mentioned that)
(It's in French, should have mentioned that)
That's really impressive! I don't know enough French yet to really be able to use it, but the 'quiz without words' should still be relevant :)
Maybe consider posting your site as a 'Show HN' at some point?
Maybe consider posting your site as a 'Show HN' at some point?
Superbe site, je l'aime beaucoup. Quel boulot.
At least make them send you the C&D! And you can get some attention for your hard work in the weeks/months before they do. Who knows what it will lead to?
Do what every other VC firm does, do it and don’t care. When the C&D comes, comply. Let users cause an uproar for you.
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.
I started building a Magic based data science tool for 6 months before coming to the same inevitable conclusion. It sits in a Github private repo rotting away.
Better to go for it then completely shelve it would think. You could also r skin it in some fashion, like make it more generic and have users provide their own decks (which happen to be MTG) etc
Cockatrice has been around for a while without getting a C&D. They separate the game client from the card images to get around it. Could do similar.
There's probably someone out there with a great card game that is just lacking a site...
Could you adapt the thing to suit another card game?
Could you adapt the thing to suit another card game?
Please release it anonymously. I beg you
Have you tried contacting them to see if they are interested in using it to their advantage as well?
They already paid millions to develop and sell another 2 versions of this. No way they want OPs,
At best they will bully anyone who made anything to hand it over to them (for free "or else"), and then scavenge on it in case they see anything they like for future 'features'.
Also, how come Wizards don't go after Cockatrice, but would go after your site?
They did go after Cockatrice. The original developer had to step away. It's unclear what the current situation is with whoever stepped up to take it over.
Maybe adapt it to your own game? Just look how Balatro blew up!
Well, this has nothing to do with programming and goes way beyond being merely "useless"; yet it might offer some perspective on your question and perhaps help you relativise things.
There's a global industry involving thousands of healthcare professionals, lawyers, judges, police officers, and child protection workers who have spent 50 years prosecuting tens of thousands of parents and caregivers for allegedly shaking their babies. This is based on a theory from the 1970s, which posits that virtually all infants with blood around the brain and at the back of the eyes have been violently shaken. These professionals have developed entire academic journals, conferences, curricula, and training courses to teach this "theory" to all involved professionals (hospital clinicians, police officers, prosecutors, etc.). There are likely hundreds of such courses annually in dozens of countries. These people have raised probably tens of millions of dollars for research and prevention programs against shaking which, while somewhat beneficial for the well-being of babies, have not succeeded in reducing the global incidence of shaken baby syndrome diagnoses.
It turns out this theory is largely incorrect, and only a minority of cases are likely to be actual cases of abuse: the other children suffer from rare diseases or household accidents that cause these types of bleeding, which are mistaken for signs of abuse. Every year, thousands of babies are removed from their homes and hundreds of parents and caregivers are convicted and incarcerated.
This has been known for over 20 years, with more and more professionals raising the alarm, yet the diagnoses continue to be made every day. I discovered this 8 years ago and swore to myself that I would do anything I can to end it. At the time, I met doctors who had been trying to do the same for over 15 years, and here I am, 8 years later, doing everything I can but still feeling quite lonely and helpless. I still hope to think I'm not entirely useless. But more importantly, think about all these professionals who have built an entire industry on false premises, leaving a trail of devastation around the world under the guise of "child protection", convinced they are making the world a better place. Does this fit your definition of "useless"?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/152483802311516...
There's a global industry involving thousands of healthcare professionals, lawyers, judges, police officers, and child protection workers who have spent 50 years prosecuting tens of thousands of parents and caregivers for allegedly shaking their babies. This is based on a theory from the 1970s, which posits that virtually all infants with blood around the brain and at the back of the eyes have been violently shaken. These professionals have developed entire academic journals, conferences, curricula, and training courses to teach this "theory" to all involved professionals (hospital clinicians, police officers, prosecutors, etc.). There are likely hundreds of such courses annually in dozens of countries. These people have raised probably tens of millions of dollars for research and prevention programs against shaking which, while somewhat beneficial for the well-being of babies, have not succeeded in reducing the global incidence of shaken baby syndrome diagnoses.
It turns out this theory is largely incorrect, and only a minority of cases are likely to be actual cases of abuse: the other children suffer from rare diseases or household accidents that cause these types of bleeding, which are mistaken for signs of abuse. Every year, thousands of babies are removed from their homes and hundreds of parents and caregivers are convicted and incarcerated.
This has been known for over 20 years, with more and more professionals raising the alarm, yet the diagnoses continue to be made every day. I discovered this 8 years ago and swore to myself that I would do anything I can to end it. At the time, I met doctors who had been trying to do the same for over 15 years, and here I am, 8 years later, doing everything I can but still feeling quite lonely and helpless. I still hope to think I'm not entirely useless. But more importantly, think about all these professionals who have built an entire industry on false premises, leaving a trail of devastation around the world under the guise of "child protection", convinced they are making the world a better place. Does this fit your definition of "useless"?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/152483802311516...
Someone I knew was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years after taking his child to the ER. The doc there decided it was "shaken baby syndrome" and called the cops. After that, he was on the guilty-until-proven innocent track. The body was cremated with no second opinion.
He still has three or four years to go. No parole here for "baby killers."
He still has three or four years to go. No parole here for "baby killers."
The justice system is filled with all sorts of this stuff, sadly. Claiming they can match a shell to the gun it came out of, blood spatter, etc. My favorite example of this existing at a micro scale is when a professor claimed she could determine age, sex, and race from the footprint of a suspect.
[1] https://greensboro.com/anthropologist-testified-nationwide-g...
[1] https://greensboro.com/anthropologist-testified-nationwide-g...
The guy that realized that washing your hand prevents mother and babies from dying in child birth was ignored and he got insane. I dunno what my point is. Maybe that these things are some sort of grind?
He didn't go insane, but the doctors he challenged forcibly had him committed
> In 1865, János Balassa wrote a document referring Semmelweis to a mental institution. On 30 July, Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra lured him, under the pretense of visiting one of Hebra's "new Institutes", to a Viennese insane asylum located in Lazarettgasse. Semmelweis surmised what was happening and tried to leave. He was severely beaten by several guards, secured in a straitjacket, and confined to a darkened cell. Apart from the straitjacket, treatments at the mental institution included dousing with cold water and administering castor oil, a laxative. He died after two weeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
> In 1865, János Balassa wrote a document referring Semmelweis to a mental institution. On 30 July, Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra lured him, under the pretense of visiting one of Hebra's "new Institutes", to a Viennese insane asylum located in Lazarettgasse. Semmelweis surmised what was happening and tried to leave. He was severely beaten by several guards, secured in a straitjacket, and confined to a darkened cell. Apart from the straitjacket, treatments at the mental institution included dousing with cold water and administering castor oil, a laxative. He died after two weeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
I’m one of these people who, until reading your comment, thought shaken baby syndrome really was a thing… Thanks for spreading the info!
To be clear, it is really a thing. The blood in the brain and behind the eyes can be explained with violent shaking. It's just not the only explanation for those symptoms, and some innocent parents/caregivers have had to suffer due to the system regarding violent shaking as the only cause.
Actually, even the question to know whether the blood in the brain and behind the eyes can be explained with violent shaking (without impact) is debated as the scientific evidence is still lacking. I said "without impact" because the answer is clearly yes when there is an impact -- but there will also be additional markers of trauma in those cases.
So, it's not only to know whether it's the only cause, but even more fundamentally, whether it is a cause.
In any case, one can't really say that SBS is "not a thing", because babies are definitely shaken, and some are injured or die -- there's no debate about that, unfortunately.
[1] https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom...
So, it's not only to know whether it's the only cause, but even more fundamentally, whether it is a cause.
In any case, one can't really say that SBS is "not a thing", because babies are definitely shaken, and some are injured or die -- there's no debate about that, unfortunately.
[1] https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom...
I firmly believe that there is no reason to take away a baby from its parents. You can jail the parents if they're convicted of a crime. But without doing that, you can't just separate the child from them.
Inform lawyers? They can cite this as credible doubt, or whatever the correct legal term is.
Yes, there are lawyers who have become experts on these cases and whose tireless work have helped hundreds of people. But that doesn't scale, there are tens of thousands of cases. The real solution will come when doctors fully update their knowledge, which may still take a decade or two.
Is is possible they don't want to update on that? It seems this is all some sadistic plot to make people guilty of invented crimes, I can't see what else it could be at this scale.
Nah, it's just the inertia of a bad idea: and a bad idea with big consequences is one of those things which is really hard for people to change their minds on. Just think, if a doctor who has testified in many of these cases were to understand that they were wrong, it would mean they would know they had contributed to the imprisoning of many innocents. It's not at all an easy task emotionally to come to terms with that, so denial is a very common outcome.
Exactly, that's the major obstacle we're facing: a particular kind of psychological bias (very human...)
It’s just societal inertia, really. Average adult human being rarely changes his mind on anything.
Is there a website people can link doctors to?
We've had one in French for a while, and we've been wanting to create an English version for years. It's about time we get started on it. Otherwise, there's already https://shakenbaby.science/, which serves as a landing page for a recent book.
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 leave a company, and the rest will get thrown away not long after that.
This doesn't really bum me out, but I can certainly understand why people experience it that way.
Honestly though, I think it's worse when things I've created do persist for a long time. They're never nearly good enough and I hate to think that they still exist nonetheless.
I guess my point is: try not to sweat this stuff; it will drive you crazy.
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 leave a company, and the rest will get thrown away not long after that.
This doesn't really bum me out, but I can certainly understand why people experience it that way.
Honestly though, I think it's worse when things I've created do persist for a long time. They're never nearly good enough and I hate to think that they still exist nonetheless.
I guess my point is: try not to sweat this stuff; it will drive you crazy.
A proof of concept is t really the same thing as a lot of the stories here because the entire point of a POC is to literally prove if a concept works (the clue is in the name). If a concept doesn’t work then that’s still a successful POC because you’ve then saved more time that would have been spent building out a MVP.
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.
Software, and product development in general, is ultimately a creative endeavor. A nontrivial portion of attempts end up in the trash.
Needed to read this, thank you!
Working for big tech, our Director wanted to add "ML" to one of our workflows no matter what. He identified a "problematic step" and a team of scientist spent 1 year coming up with a ML model to replace this step. I was asked to deploy this solution in production.
When we tested the model (which somehow hadn't happened before) we found that the workflow was 5% quicker, but the results were more than 10% worse, and was more expensive to run. Everyone hated the idea, but the director kept pushing to do it, "or I'll find someone else to do it". I ran away and never looked back.
When we tested the model (which somehow hadn't happened before) we found that the workflow was 5% quicker, but the results were more than 10% worse, and was more expensive to run. Everyone hated the idea, but the director kept pushing to do it, "or I'll find someone else to do it". I ran away and never looked back.
Do you think the director was truly convinced AI was a good technical solution despite the evidence? Or is it possible they were participating in an emperor-has-no-clothes situation, i.e. the CEO has mandated all teams implement AI somewhere, anywhere?
I'm wondering if the CEO just understands their clients will buy more products if they have "AI" in the title, even if it's pointless.
Your job isn't to make good software, it's to make profitable software.
Your job isn't to make good software, it's to make profitable software.
This was an internal tool, so no use in fluffy marketing.
I'm not saying it was a sensible decision, but I think at that level you kinda need to have a few balls in the air. Having a few projects using ML or whatever else is in vogue is defensible, might be a win, might build some expertise, shows you're in touch with the current thing etc.
Yup exactly, sometimes you should try new things. They don't always work out. Although in this case it seemed like an expensive mistake...
I think this was a folly by our director. About a year after I left I learnt that he had "left to pursue other opportunities", which is corporate speak for "he got canned".
Almost assuredly he knew it was a bad idea, but had a goal of "implement machine learning" from his VP or just wanted it in his resume.
I'm trying to think of a single actually useful thing I ever worked on..
You have worked on earning money to live in your world. Good job. Don't over think work.
This is the right attitude. Unless you own the business, you have no moral responsibility to ensure the projects you work on have a purpose. You can, of course, optionally choose to not work on projects you believe have a bad or evil purpose. I've quit jobs where I though the project was evil.
You're writing the code, or producing the documentation, managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your role is, and in exchange your company is paying you money. That's the bottom line. If you think it's a useless project, then you should be even doubly grateful that a company exists that will pay you your (presumably good) salary to create something useless! I worked on a totally useless project in the past, a lot like some of the comments here describe, and I went into work every day thanking the stars that my company was stupid enough to pay me to do this!
You're writing the code, or producing the documentation, managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your role is, and in exchange your company is paying you money. That's the bottom line. If you think it's a useless project, then you should be even doubly grateful that a company exists that will pay you your (presumably good) salary to create something useless! I worked on a totally useless project in the past, a lot like some of the comments here describe, and I went into work every day thanking the stars that my company was stupid enough to pay me to do this!
This. I sit down the hall from the CEO of our company. I hear nearly every meeting and conversation that goes on. Don't think for a minute that most CEOs aren't scrounging money from useless bullshit circumstances half the time. They are very pragmatic and just really don't give a fuck where the money comes from.
Morality wise isn’t it the opposite? If you own the business, it’s your money to waste
If you work for the business you are wasting others money.
If you work for someone else and carry out your tasks as instructed, and have tried to bring up the absurdity of it all as specced but they insist you do it anyway then I don’t see what would be unethical about it? Only talking about brain dead/useless endeavors, not bad/evil projects.
I program because I could do nothing else. I do it because it is the thing I most want to do with any given moment. The fact they pay me to do it is fortunate otherwise I would be homeless and programming in a shelter somewhere. I over think work simply because the aspect of “work” is entirely incidental to what I do out of passion.
That said, I also never believe anything I do is useful and that also isn’t why I do what I do.
That said, I also never believe anything I do is useful and that also isn’t why I do what I do.
I do the programming for free. Taking the annual leadership impact and cybersecurity training survey is what they pay me for.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with also wanting the work you do to have a positive impact in the world. Whether it helps people, entertains them, or saves them time it feels great to get paid and also make a difference. Some may not be happy with just wanting a paycheque and that’s OK too.
The only reason to give a damn about what you're working on is to make sure you're accumulating good bullet points for your resume.
There are actually companies to work for where you can get involved and develop ownership over things, and where how well you do relates to the success of the business. If you have a good relationship with your coworkers, you may even want to do a good job to try to maximize the likelihood that not just you keep putting bread on the table but they do, too! Crazier things have happened.
I've been in that situation before, but I'm starting to get to a point in my career where I've basically plateaued. And before you tell me that I just need to buckle down and re-engage, the company I'm currently at gives across the board 2-3% raises every year to their top performers and my team has delivered some really key strategic projects, so there's not really any point to doing anything else at this company. It doesn't meaningfully change my compensation.
Good to know I'm not the only one...
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?
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?
who else came looking for a comment like this...
Kiosk Banking. Back in the 1990's, just before the web became a thing, it was an idea to bring banking to consumers without the bank buildking, which they called "brickless banking". Kiosks would be placed in public locations like malls. Customers would enter the kiosk, close the curtain or door, then connect via video-call with one of the agent in the call centres. Depending what product the customer wanted (mortgage, credit card, etc), the kiosk would print the necessary forms for the customer to sign then deposit into a secure mailbox in the kiosk. Millions of investment $$$ were planned for this ... then it was suddenly cancelled when the bank realized what this "web" thing might eventually become.
Wells Fargo has something they call a "digital branch" which, despite the name, is a brick and mortar location, just with fewer services. Like, you can't get change, and they don't have real tellers. They have a few ATMs and some people who must be there to walk you through some things, but overall it's pretty useless. It's one of the reasons we're moving our banking to Chase.
A lot of French banks are like this. Probably elsewhere in Europe too.
“Advisory” by appointment is where the profit is, not cash management.
If you need a lot of cash, the “teller” will give you temp permissions for X minutes to use the ATM for your big withdrawal.
“Advisory” by appointment is where the profit is, not cash management.
If you need a lot of cash, the “teller” will give you temp permissions for X minutes to use the ATM for your big withdrawal.
This kiosk thing, exactly as you describe was built by A Turkish bank, way after mobile banking was in everyone's pocket.
The bank's customers are mostly aging so they thought this would be great help to them.
I recall the kiosk got into a few locations, worked for brief period of time and then got deprecated all together.
The bank's customers are mostly aging so they thought this would be great help to them.
I recall the kiosk got into a few locations, worked for brief period of time and then got deprecated all together.
I've actually seen this in the wild this year. It was placed at a train station in a small town in southern Germany, which presumably did not have a physical bank branch. It was exactly as you said: basically a chair, keyboard and screen in a tiny building (not much larger than a phone booth).
When I began reading this I thought it would end in people hooking kiosks full of cash to the back of their pickup trucks and screeching away.
A few years back, I was assigned to a new team and had to run some analysis on a selection of hardware that kept failing quality checks. Was told this was of the utmost importance to the product and that a future production push hinged on solving this problem. I was given a week. The scope of work would entail at least one really late night into the project.
On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a passing engineer from a different team stopped by my desk to chat. Saw my screen and said "neat Python code, what's it all for?"
I replied, "oh it's to do some number crunching on that quality problem."
To which he blandly goes: "Oh. Didn't you hear? We scrapped that entire product line 3 weeks ago."
Reader, I almost actually threw my keyboard off the desk.
(If there was ever an argument for in-office work, it's coworkers telling you to STOP working on something and rescuing you from situations like this...)
On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a passing engineer from a different team stopped by my desk to chat. Saw my screen and said "neat Python code, what's it all for?"
I replied, "oh it's to do some number crunching on that quality problem."
To which he blandly goes: "Oh. Didn't you hear? We scrapped that entire product line 3 weeks ago."
Reader, I almost actually threw my keyboard off the desk.
(If there was ever an argument for in-office work, it's coworkers telling you to STOP working on something and rescuing you from situations like this...)
As useless as it feels, how you handled it, diving in with full focus to the point that you stayed up all night- you're working a muscle many engineers don't and you'll be better for it.
The muscle of doing pointless bullshit without understanding that it’s pointless… are you kidding? This has got to be the most troll comment I ever saw in this website.
No I get what the response meant.
It’s the muscle of being able to quickly orient yourself in sudden problems and drive towards useful solutions in a focused manner.
And to be fair, if the product line hadn’t been thrown out before I started, the project would have been useful in either A) fixing the product or B) providing justification to scrap the product line (probably the more likely outcome)
And I developed a nice tool that got used somewhere else later useful.
It’s the muscle of being able to quickly orient yourself in sudden problems and drive towards useful solutions in a focused manner.
And to be fair, if the product line hadn’t been thrown out before I started, the project would have been useful in either A) fixing the product or B) providing justification to scrap the product line (probably the more likely outcome)
And I developed a nice tool that got used somewhere else later useful.
Friend of mine worked through 400 pages of specifications for a big pharma software (lots of Java, CRUD, microservices). The project started late, it took longer than expected and by middle of the project they learned the client already migrated to another software.
So the team had continue for several months to fulfill the catalogue of specifications, pass (external) QA and already knew the software will never be used.
He said it was all custom and exclusive and couldn't be reused or sold to another client.
So the team had continue for several months to fulfill the catalogue of specifications, pass (external) QA and already knew the software will never be used.
He said it was all custom and exclusive and couldn't be reused or sold to another client.
This passage from The Tao of Programming comes to mind.
BOOK 7: Corporate Wisdom
https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
[7.1] A novice asked the Master: "In the East, there is a great tree-structure that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go Hence!' or 'Go Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity exist?"
The Master replied: "You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"
BOOK 7: Corporate Wisdom
https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
[7.1] A novice asked the Master: "In the East, there is a great tree-structure that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go Hence!' or 'Go Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity exist?"
The Master replied: "You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"
It's all fun and games until one of those useless branches decides it will try to make itself useful by making your life harder, for no other purpose than to show that it did something.
Maybe 13 years ago when I was a fresh and inexperienced dev in my first job, I was once asked to work on a C# side project at work where people could run common dev workflows (think running database migrations, deployments etc) by specifying them as XML instead of scripts.
I had fun, eventually they wanted things like conditional workflows which I had to think how to model in XML.
To anyone with even a bit of experience, they can tell that it wasn't long until this not-invented-here-driven-monstrosity of an idea was abandoned as it's not something you can do as a couple of hours per week side project and have it be massively useful in a short timeframe.
So it was a useless effort for the company, but as a very inexperienced dev, it was the first project where afterwards explanations of how things like lisp worked started to make sense to me intuitively considering how backwards I was in my naive attempts.
Even the project you're describing, learn to be ok with looking back on parts of your career and being thankful that only your employers money was being burned on "useless" things while you were taking forward the valuable lessons.
I had fun, eventually they wanted things like conditional workflows which I had to think how to model in XML.
To anyone with even a bit of experience, they can tell that it wasn't long until this not-invented-here-driven-monstrosity of an idea was abandoned as it's not something you can do as a couple of hours per week side project and have it be massively useful in a short timeframe.
So it was a useless effort for the company, but as a very inexperienced dev, it was the first project where afterwards explanations of how things like lisp worked started to make sense to me intuitively considering how backwards I was in my naive attempts.
Even the project you're describing, learn to be ok with looking back on parts of your career and being thankful that only your employers money was being burned on "useless" things while you were taking forward the valuable lessons.
I was forced to orchestrate the replacement of Kafka with IBM MQ in a running financial institution because new execs understood it better from previous roles in other companies. Crazy newfangled micro services and event driven architecture freaked them out. Change was across about 50 microservices, maybe 5/6 different tech stacks (SAP, Java, .net, python etc). Had to write the MQ scripts to build up the topic and queue stack because their amazing ops guy deployed prod by taking a backup of dev files and installing it on the prod server as his “installation”, and played whack a mole with whatever errors he got. I don’t know how we survived. Did actually manage to make it a useful change but it was soul destroying. Lost zero messages and delivered zero duplicates, and could roll back anytime. They’re ready for whatever the 90’s throws at them.
That will connect right up with DB/2 probably, no problemo.
You'll just need the right Java JRE - exact version.
You'll just need the right Java JRE - exact version.
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.
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.
I wonder, the ones who ordered the enterprise grade project, what was their background and amount of software and technical knowledge?
Interesting!
Interesting!
The company bosses wanted it... the same ones that hired us for the "temporary solution"... we could charge a lot, because they were in a hurry, and couldn't find anyone else, so it was a good situation for us, but we were definitely cheaper than those two "enterprise grade" teams :)
I've worked on two different startups that built products until our runway ended—over a year of work in both cases—and then pulled the plug before getting our first customer.
Maybe that doesn't count?
I've also worked on a multi-year product for a large company in Redmond that I was really proud of when building it. It doesn't matter what the product was supposed to do, just imagine it sounding kind of sexy and being very complex and brainy. It was for scientists. When I told someone who wasn't dumb but was outside the software industry about what I'd built, he looked confused and said "well, why wouldn't you just use [a free piece of software that is well understood and runs on every device] instead?" and I had no good answer, because he was right.
Maybe that doesn't count?
I've also worked on a multi-year product for a large company in Redmond that I was really proud of when building it. It doesn't matter what the product was supposed to do, just imagine it sounding kind of sexy and being very complex and brainy. It was for scientists. When I told someone who wasn't dumb but was outside the software industry about what I'd built, he looked confused and said "well, why wouldn't you just use [a free piece of software that is well understood and runs on every device] instead?" and I had no good answer, because he was right.
Sounds like recreating Doom. Or Linux.
Worked for a client via freelancing. Built 3 projects, all failed. He likes to follow the trends, first SaaS, then crypto/blockchain, and now AI. He apparently raises money, pays himself and builds bullshit projects. That's it. But while doing so, he does everything to look like a legit startup.
Ngl, he was my first major client with whom I gained a lot of experience, but it doesn't change the fact that he is a hype chaser.
Ngl, he was my first major client with whom I gained a lot of experience, but it doesn't change the fact that he is a hype chaser.
Being a parasite is a very effective survival strategy.
No cleantech???
The difference between startup and bullshit is pretty blurry, no?
There's the question of intent, but maybe this guy believes his own bullshit.
I would wager most of the startup world is like this. VCs can be exploited. Yes, 99% (or whatever) of startups fail, but a good number of them were never intending to "succeed". It was always just about getting a paycheck for the founder.
If you ever go to a seed stage VC info session (such as Antler's), you will see that the vast majority of attendees are just unemployed people looking for a job.
If you ever go to a seed stage VC info session (such as Antler's), you will see that the vast majority of attendees are just unemployed people looking for a job.
Any time you feel useless, remember that it's someone's job to install turn signals into BMWs.
BMW turn signals used to work differently until I think the mid-2010s. You would press down to turn on the left signal, it would revert back to the middle, then you would press down again to turn it off.
People would turn on the signal and then accidentally turn on the opposite signal when trying to turn it off. So a lot of people stopped using them.
People would turn on the signal and then accidentally turn on the opposite signal when trying to turn it off. So a lot of people stopped using them.
I have this same problem with cars like the Honda Fit, where you can't immediately abort a signal because the minimum number of blinks allowed by the system is greater than 1. Far longer than it takes to realise you were about to turn too soon, or attempt a merge at a wrong exit.
The excessive minimum-blinks usually causes me to try moving the lever farther or jiggle it because "off" didn't seem to mean __off__, with the frequent result that the opposite side's turn signal engages, probably confusing other drivers.
Supposedly, this is a Feature, so that a brief flick of the control allows sending a preset number of blinks to other drivers. Myself, I think "off" should mean OFF.
The excessive minimum-blinks usually causes me to try moving the lever farther or jiggle it because "off" didn't seem to mean __off__, with the frequent result that the opposite side's turn signal engages, probably confusing other drivers.
Supposedly, this is a Feature, so that a brief flick of the control allows sending a preset number of blinks to other drivers. Myself, I think "off" should mean OFF.
Yup, I remember when I got a loaner car that had those new momentary switches and I couldn't believe how terrible they were. What made it all the more baffling/disappointing was that earlier BMWs had some of the nicest turn signal switches available that were so satisfying to use.
I test drove a 1 series in 2018 and it still worked like that
They aren't useless at all, I see them used all the time when they double park somewhere.
Reminds me of the difference between a BMW and a porcupine.
(A porcupine has pricks on the outside.)
(A porcupine has pricks on the outside.)
Someone once told me "as a current BMW driver, the whole 'BMW drivers don't use signals' is complete bullshit, I didn't use them before I drove one!"
So I wonder if someone not using turn signals in a non-BMW is a leading indicator that they may buy one in the future.
Shower thoughts.
So I wonder if someone not using turn signals in a non-BMW is a leading indicator that they may buy one in the future.
Shower thoughts.
A study actually went into this[0]. Or a popular science summary of it[1]
[1] https://www.zmescience.com/science/psychology-science/asshol...
Assholes really are more likely to drive Mercedes or BMWs, study finds
It’s not that all of them are assholes, but according to a new study, self-centered men who are argumentative, stubborn, and overall disagreeable are much more likely to own a high-status car such as an Audi, BMW or Mercedes.
[1] https://www.zmescience.com/science/psychology-science/asshol...
You nailed it.
Or count votes at Russian elections
Have you see the new animated turn signals on luxury cars? I've noticed that people actually use them!
Yes, I always wonder WTF is going on and after it's too late to be of any use it registers and I'm reminded of all the stuff I'm reading about in this thread.
[deleted]
? I don’t get it, isn’t the person installing critical safety features in an automobile performing a valuable social function?
The joke is that BMW drivers don't use them.
Not familiar with that meme/stereotype…
Many people merge without using turn signals, but the subset that do it where you will notice it (e.g, close to you) seem to often be in BMWs.
I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done a study. Would be amusing.
I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done a study. Would be amusing.
Sounds distinctly like a Bay Area/populated city thing.
TikTok is leaking
That stereotype is ancient.
I've first heard it like 15 years ago.
Humor? In my Hacker News?
I spent much of 2023 writing the code for our company to implement the changes in the new version of this standards document:
https://www.frc.org.uk/library/standards-codes-policy/actuar...
As far as getting paid to write code in our industry goes, it was quite enjoyable. Most of the code was totally new and not particularly tightly coupled with the rest of the system, so the challenges were in understanding the subtleties of the requirements and coming up with a clean and performant design rather than fighting legacy code.
Touch wood, I've done a reasonable job. We got it done a couple of months before it was required and a full dry run with our entire customer base only found one pretty subtle edge case that I'd missed.
So we get to keep our license to look after billions of pounds of customers retirement savings, which is kinda important, and because I worked on this other developers got to work on stuff that actually helps our customers (which is important for our customers, and ensuring that our business retains and expands said customer base).
However, the new version of the regulations, while written with the laudable intention of providing people with more accurate and unbiased information about how much money they will have on retirement, achieve nothing of the sort. It just replaces one set of assumptions that are wrong on some edge cases, with another set of assumptions that are wrong on a different set of edge cases, in some cases arguably wrong in worse ways. Nor does it address the real weaknesses in these statements.
And across the industry, there are literally dozens of companies who had developers who spent similar amounts of time to me implementing this new standard, for no benefit of any of their customers that I can discern either.
https://www.frc.org.uk/library/standards-codes-policy/actuar...
As far as getting paid to write code in our industry goes, it was quite enjoyable. Most of the code was totally new and not particularly tightly coupled with the rest of the system, so the challenges were in understanding the subtleties of the requirements and coming up with a clean and performant design rather than fighting legacy code.
Touch wood, I've done a reasonable job. We got it done a couple of months before it was required and a full dry run with our entire customer base only found one pretty subtle edge case that I'd missed.
So we get to keep our license to look after billions of pounds of customers retirement savings, which is kinda important, and because I worked on this other developers got to work on stuff that actually helps our customers (which is important for our customers, and ensuring that our business retains and expands said customer base).
However, the new version of the regulations, while written with the laudable intention of providing people with more accurate and unbiased information about how much money they will have on retirement, achieve nothing of the sort. It just replaces one set of assumptions that are wrong on some edge cases, with another set of assumptions that are wrong on a different set of edge cases, in some cases arguably wrong in worse ways. Nor does it address the real weaknesses in these statements.
And across the industry, there are literally dozens of companies who had developers who spent similar amounts of time to me implementing this new standard, for no benefit of any of their customers that I can discern either.
I feel much the same way about working on code for Australia's Consumer Data Right (CDR).
Mostly it would have been OK if the code handed to me (a project I took over) wasn't the worst kind of "smart people doing stupid things" dependency injection hell in javascript. Then, having to deal with the ever evolving CDR regulations for the banking sector and trying to get the institution I was working for to take it seriously (there are fines involved if it doesn't work).
The end result - nobody in the public actually uses it except for a few dodgy lender-of-last-resort companies.
Mostly it would have been OK if the code handed to me (a project I took over) wasn't the worst kind of "smart people doing stupid things" dependency injection hell in javascript. Then, having to deal with the ever evolving CDR regulations for the banking sector and trying to get the institution I was working for to take it seriously (there are fines involved if it doesn't work).
The end result - nobody in the public actually uses it except for a few dodgy lender-of-last-resort companies.
My very first full-time job was to adapt a COTS ATM protocol stack to run on embedded devices to power a truck & satellite network. The deadline was 1 year to get the stack running on the hardware, and would be the first of 4 annual milestones related to the project. After about 6 months, I was mostly done the work when I found out that the project was moving to a single release at the 4 year mark.
Ok, not so bad, except that the scope of my task remained the same. The project and my role was funded by the customer for the 4 years, but my deliverable remained the same. My job was to literally do nothing while being available to debug things if needed.
Ok, not so bad, except that the scope of my task remained the same. The project and my role was funded by the customer for the 4 years, but my deliverable remained the same. My job was to literally do nothing while being available to debug things if needed.
Started my career on ATM. Good way to develop an enduring cynicism about industry hype.
It was actually my second gig working on that as well. The first was a college internship writing management software for a 14 slot switch w/75Gb backplane. The best feature of the software was the "suit" command, which restarted the boards in all 14 slots in sequence, which created a nice light show. We used it whenever someone in a suit showed up in the lab.
Great time to spend on whatever you want to learn about.
You need to support services that are getting deprecated until the very last user leaves. And believe ne, sometimes it might take several years more than the company would like to. As long as someone is using it, you're contributing to its stability, and it's not useless. See yourself as the orchestra on the titanic, playing to the best of their craft until the ship goes under.
I worked for a full year on a service who was used by exactly 0 people. Then had to do all the consequent security updates and such. It took another 2y until we were finally shutting everything down. That was useless.
I worked for a full year on a service who was used by exactly 0 people. Then had to do all the consequent security updates and such. It took another 2y until we were finally shutting everything down. That was useless.
This is indeed something my opinion shifted in the last 2 years. Some of my superiors hate it, but they are kinda getting it after some patience.
The thing is: Slowly deprecating a service doesn't work. At least on my patience level, which is measured in years. I don't have decade level patience available.
If you announce that a service is being decommissioned, the good teams leave across some time. This time can be a month, a year but they leave. It will take longer than expected, but the good teams move and scurry and make it work. Those are the good teams, they cooperate constructively and the migrations work.
But the other teams just don't.
And there is nothing else to say about it. They don't. And you can't take it away because there's C-Level support behind those bad teams. So you can't take it away, or else high management comes around asking questions and being pushy.
To me it seems like you either invest the necessary amount of energy to maintain a service, or you invest energy to actively kill that service. There is no tolerating, there is no "low-effort maintenance". Tell the next CVE > 8 in that service it's "low effort maintenance" and kindly ask the attackers to not attack that service because it's "maintenance".
Either this is a service we offer, or we actively work on migrating things off of it.
The thing is: Slowly deprecating a service doesn't work. At least on my patience level, which is measured in years. I don't have decade level patience available.
If you announce that a service is being decommissioned, the good teams leave across some time. This time can be a month, a year but they leave. It will take longer than expected, but the good teams move and scurry and make it work. Those are the good teams, they cooperate constructively and the migrations work.
But the other teams just don't.
And there is nothing else to say about it. They don't. And you can't take it away because there's C-Level support behind those bad teams. So you can't take it away, or else high management comes around asking questions and being pushy.
To me it seems like you either invest the necessary amount of energy to maintain a service, or you invest energy to actively kill that service. There is no tolerating, there is no "low-effort maintenance". Tell the next CVE > 8 in that service it's "low effort maintenance" and kindly ask the attackers to not attack that service because it's "maintenance".
Either this is a service we offer, or we actively work on migrating things off of it.
"Change Adoption Curve" - search for some images.
I talked with a few infra-ish people at Facebook once upon a time, and they described effectively a "Service Assassination Team". ImageResizer1.0, ImageResizer9000, they were an actual funded team to hunt down and destroy (and presumably help migrate) people using ImageResizer1.0 (or whatever).
It seemed that was a very forward-thinking way of looking at things to prevent an eventual "big-ball-of-mud" pile of services.
Either that, or Bezos's insight that internal teams should have an API-charge, and each team had a budget for requests between systems. If you're on ImageResizer1.0, and the costs go up 10x or 1000x, you're instantly motivated to go and search for the recommended new alternative, or eat the increased API cost (which can then be directed to the "Service Assassination Team...")
I talked with a few infra-ish people at Facebook once upon a time, and they described effectively a "Service Assassination Team". ImageResizer1.0, ImageResizer9000, they were an actual funded team to hunt down and destroy (and presumably help migrate) people using ImageResizer1.0 (or whatever).
It seemed that was a very forward-thinking way of looking at things to prevent an eventual "big-ball-of-mud" pile of services.
Either that, or Bezos's insight that internal teams should have an API-charge, and each team had a budget for requests between systems. If you're on ImageResizer1.0, and the costs go up 10x or 1000x, you're instantly motivated to go and search for the recommended new alternative, or eat the increased API cost (which can then be directed to the "Service Assassination Team...")
It’s worse when you’re maintaining and entire system to generate one page in one report that is attached to the end of a board document once a year.
If the report stayed identical for ten years it’s likely nobody would notice or care.
If the report stayed identical for ten years it’s likely nobody would notice or care.
Yep, focusing on automation and reliability for this being-deprecated thing seems useful. The goal is to increase the likelihood that it will keep running until people actually stop using it, without anybody needing to work on it. That's useful!
Never said it was the smartest investment, but it's not useless
The idea of maintaining something that no one uses sounds horrible but so is supporting something 1-5 (often on the lower end of that range) people use.
I worked indirectly for an online gambling company and they maintained multiple interfaces to their underlying gambling system because there were whales (aka big spenders) who had gotten used to the old interface and didn’t want to change.
Imagine if every redesign/refresh actually had to be a new product and you left the old version alone running in parallel. This company also wanted to do a lot of redesigns or re-imaginings, or a new platform that would “replace all the existing ones” (spoiler: it didn’t).
They had at least 5 different products running that all talked to the same backend but had to be updated occasionally to keep them working.
Also, they had a backend system that did a lot of low-level handling of customer data, it had an API but you weren’t allowed to talk to it directly. No, you needed to call this php api which talked to it and spit out the results (well, different format, but the results). But wait, there is more. Over the years they had php code calling php code (over HTTP) calling php code because they didn’t want to QA new interactions with lower levels. Since the existing stuff was “battle tested” all you could do was call the next layer down until one day your layer also got an effective code freeze. It was maddening. Oh! And each layer had its own validation, so imagine the fun of identifying at which layer your input was reject at and why. Data and errors/responses were mangled at every level.
Without knowing about all of these layers, as a contractor, I called the lowest level api since it had the most raw data (each layer normally lost some of the data or consolidated/summarized it in some way). I was told I shouldn’t call those api endpoints, instead call these ones. The higher layers required more calls and even with all of that some data just wasn’t available. Making my stuff worse while having to work with worse endpoints really sucked.
I worked indirectly for an online gambling company and they maintained multiple interfaces to their underlying gambling system because there were whales (aka big spenders) who had gotten used to the old interface and didn’t want to change.
Imagine if every redesign/refresh actually had to be a new product and you left the old version alone running in parallel. This company also wanted to do a lot of redesigns or re-imaginings, or a new platform that would “replace all the existing ones” (spoiler: it didn’t).
They had at least 5 different products running that all talked to the same backend but had to be updated occasionally to keep them working.
Also, they had a backend system that did a lot of low-level handling of customer data, it had an API but you weren’t allowed to talk to it directly. No, you needed to call this php api which talked to it and spit out the results (well, different format, but the results). But wait, there is more. Over the years they had php code calling php code (over HTTP) calling php code because they didn’t want to QA new interactions with lower levels. Since the existing stuff was “battle tested” all you could do was call the next layer down until one day your layer also got an effective code freeze. It was maddening. Oh! And each layer had its own validation, so imagine the fun of identifying at which layer your input was reject at and why. Data and errors/responses were mangled at every level.
Without knowing about all of these layers, as a contractor, I called the lowest level api since it had the most raw data (each layer normally lost some of the data or consolidated/summarized it in some way). I was told I shouldn’t call those api endpoints, instead call these ones. The higher layers required more calls and even with all of that some data just wasn’t available. Making my stuff worse while having to work with worse endpoints really sucked.
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.
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.
I was hired to design and build a loan platform from scratch. The company that hired me was a marketing agency that build WordPress and Magento sites, not scratch built platforms. but they took the bid from a large company and hired me to build it. I came in and started developing various microservices, and asked for more developers to assist. I got freelancers in other countries who usually build WordPress themes. I worked hard to keep these people building the right projects for months. then I was asked to help out with a couple of WordPress tasks for other clients. More and more of these, and finally I was called into the office and told my project was cancled by the client. They got bought out and was told that they were spending too much money on this platform before it even went anywhere. All my work got scrapped. I believe most of my code has been deleted.
I don’t know the context and details of course. But might the introduction of various microservices have impacted the cost / complexity of the project?
Dogged a bullet for being blamed for something that probably would have never left the ground anyway.
Or, missed opportunity to develop and sell the next Rocket Mortgage Platform.
Or, missed opportunity to develop and sell the next Rocket Mortgage Platform.
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 sub-site of Amazon.com and just casually? recreationally? vote between two ads. You would be presented with two B&W images and click the one you liked more. I don't know that there was any incentive to do this, but I think it was a Bezos idea.
I didn't develop it, but all the routine maintenance tasks that came along (remove this deprecated library, migrate to new hardware, update your pipeline) needed to be done for AdWhatever too. That stupid service lingered for years after it was clear nobody used it, but we had to keep maintaining it until we got the go-ahead to tear it down.
But there was a service, AdWhatever, which let users go onto a sub-site of Amazon.com and just casually? recreationally? vote between two ads. You would be presented with two B&W images and click the one you liked more. I don't know that there was any incentive to do this, but I think it was a Bezos idea.
I didn't develop it, but all the routine maintenance tasks that came along (remove this deprecated library, migrate to new hardware, update your pipeline) needed to be done for AdWhatever too. That stupid service lingered for years after it was clear nobody used it, but we had to keep maintaining it until we got the go-ahead to tear it down.
I always marvel at how bizarre it is that there's a permanent ad on the Kindle even when it's "off". The books they recommend are never pertinent to me in the slightest.
I feel like this exists so that people who use their kindle will pay trn bucks to turn it off.
It's possible things have changed, but at least while I still worked there, virtually nobody paid to turn the ads off. It was a vanishingly tiny number.
Though fun fact, some execs did the math before making the smart cover, and figured they'd make more money from that, than they lost from people not being able to see and interact with ads.
Though fun fact, some execs did the math before making the smart cover, and figured they'd make more money from that, than they lost from people not being able to see and interact with ads.
I just ignore it, I don't know why anyone would pay to turn it off. It goes away as soon as you start reading the book.
It annoyed me enough that I've paid twice. And once on a fire tablet when I found my toddler daughter playing a game on the lock screen.
> toddler daughter playing a game on the lock screen
Oh gosh, I didn't realize that was possible!
Oh gosh, I didn't realize that was possible!
Slightly off topic but I never logged in on my kindle so I don't get ads. I just load ebooks on it with my computer.
I've actually put mine into airplane mode in the very first minute and keep it until now. Just to be safe.
Yeah, the ease of avoiding the ads (not logging in, jailbreaking it, or just getting a cover) were all big parts of why I felt like kindle ads were so much less offensive than most online advertising.
I wanted an ebook reader so I looked around and bought a Kobo Forma. It's great. No ads that I've noticed, I can load whatever I want onto it.
As I understand it, Kindle is locked to Amazon. I don't know why anyone would pay for that, especially if it also shows ads.
As I understand it, Kindle is locked to Amazon. I don't know why anyone would pay for that, especially if it also shows ads.
It's not locked to Amazon, I load whatever book I want just fine.
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’.)
You are right. This does not happen always, but sometimes. Maybe with Wikipedia, not dictionary?
Maybe with my english-russian dictionary.
What got me was the kindle’s inability to not have ragged edges on the right. It’s really not that hard to implement I’d assume, LaTeX and the kobo do it well. Switched to kobo + calibre years ago, never looked back.
Also, I try my best not to buy anything Amazon anymore because Bezos is a gigantic prick.
Also, I try my best not to buy anything Amazon anymore because Bezos is a gigantic prick.
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 direction on what I should be doing. There was no simulator, no tests, no guidance.
In that time, I would practice my own Leetcode problems in preparation for other jobs. All day long.
About two weeks before I left the company, I received my security clearance. That’s when I realized… they were just killing time until I had my clearance.
All of a sudden, the flood gates were opened, and I learned about a really interesting project. Not interesting enough to keep me though ;)
Six years later, I’ve 3x’d my compensation. And I love my job now (web development).
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 direction on what I should be doing. There was no simulator, no tests, no guidance.
In that time, I would practice my own Leetcode problems in preparation for other jobs. All day long.
About two weeks before I left the company, I received my security clearance. That’s when I realized… they were just killing time until I had my clearance.
All of a sudden, the flood gates were opened, and I learned about a really interesting project. Not interesting enough to keep me though ;)
Six years later, I’ve 3x’d my compensation. And I love my job now (web development).
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.
I've increased my income roughly over 20x over past 20 years, its not impossible. Still doing same 100% employed java dev role as on Day 1. I've moved employers and countries few times, did some consulting too, purpose wasn't the money per se but when choosing your next employer salary is a good general indicator of how well you will be treated.
Started really low since I knew I wanted the job and it would be temporary, didn't have any students loans (Europe baby!), and eventually ended up in position that pays better than 99% of software devs in Europe. Not most rewarding work, but its just work for me, life that matter happens for me when I log out.
Started really low since I knew I wanted the job and it would be temporary, didn't have any students loans (Europe baby!), and eventually ended up in position that pays better than 99% of software devs in Europe. Not most rewarding work, but its just work for me, life that matter happens for me when I log out.
If you're a skilled webdev at FANG, ~250k+ is trivial.
Lots of defense contractors will try and pay their fresh meat 80k so they can make more money. Government gets really touchy about hourly rates per person, but has no problem with 'fair' hourly rates for many more people to do the job one person could and should do.
Lots of defense contractors will try and pay their fresh meat 80k so they can make more money. Government gets really touchy about hourly rates per person, but has no problem with 'fair' hourly rates for many more people to do the job one person could and should do.
Your instinct is spot on.
I made 76k at the defense contractor.
I made 255k this year (6 years later).
I made 76k at the defense contractor.
I made 255k this year (6 years later).
My old post is relevant here, “Why I prefer making useless stuff”. Which is very different than working on useless stuff at work!
https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html
https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html
I appreciate how making useless stuff is fun as a hobby, and enjoying that play is important. Even crows enjoy their sleds [0], that’s how important play is.
Needing to complete a project for the sake of your continued survival/paycheck, while adhering to specific criteria, is very much the opposite experience. A study done where _people were paid to put together Lego sets_ put together less of them when they had to watch the researcher take them apart immediately afterwards, despite intrinsically enjoying Legos [1].
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnI4dhZZxQ [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...
Needing to complete a project for the sake of your continued survival/paycheck, while adhering to specific criteria, is very much the opposite experience. A study done where _people were paid to put together Lego sets_ put together less of them when they had to watch the researcher take them apart immediately afterwards, despite intrinsically enjoying Legos [1].
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnI4dhZZxQ [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...
[deleted]
"Revela Preço" (Price Reveal), a smartphone app for comparing prices across establishments.
In Brazil, all businesses must issue an invoice or a fiscal receipt. The latter includes purchase details and a QR code with a URL that directs the consumer to the respective state's SEFAZ (Department of Finance). This allows consumers to view their purchase receipt online and print a second copy if needed.
However, each SEFAZ operates differently, if they function at all. This hindered the app's progress, as the constant unavailability of state services led to numerous user complaints.
The project is currently on hold until the receipt consultation process is centralized within the Federal Revenue Service, similar to how invoices are handled currently.
The project's goal is to allow users to compare recent prices from those who have purchased and scanned their receipts, enabling them to create shopping lists in advance and know where they can save money.
Relying on each state's government to keep their systems operational has become the project's biggest obstacle.
I consider it "useless" because of the time spent on it and the inability to continue due to our government's inefficiency.
In Brazil, all businesses must issue an invoice or a fiscal receipt. The latter includes purchase details and a QR code with a URL that directs the consumer to the respective state's SEFAZ (Department of Finance). This allows consumers to view their purchase receipt online and print a second copy if needed.
However, each SEFAZ operates differently, if they function at all. This hindered the app's progress, as the constant unavailability of state services led to numerous user complaints.
The project is currently on hold until the receipt consultation process is centralized within the Federal Revenue Service, similar to how invoices are handled currently.
The project's goal is to allow users to compare recent prices from those who have purchased and scanned their receipts, enabling them to create shopping lists in advance and know where they can save money.
Relying on each state's government to keep their systems operational has become the project's biggest obstacle.
I consider it "useless" because of the time spent on it and the inability to continue due to our government's inefficiency.
Variable Discovery.
Yes that isn't a thing; its a term I came up with, and I sincerely hope no one ever has to encounter such a situation.
So, someone wrote a complex data processing pipeline, that read from some tables in a DB, processed the data in small and large ways, finally producing a bunch of variables that were passed into a downstream ML model. No documentation was produced, and the developer had exited the company.
The problem: because of some high stakes issues with said pipeline's results, we needed to (quickly) find out which final variables were drawing information from which initial DB fields. And all we had were a bunch of scattered scripts (Python and Pig I think).
For me that translated to this task: read the scripts to trace a path of successive variable definitions in terms of other variables, eventually connecting each output variable to one or more input column name. It took me 2 long days to trace these paths by manually reading the scripts. The evening sessions were particularly mind-numbing, and involved a few glasses of wine.
Yes that isn't a thing; its a term I came up with, and I sincerely hope no one ever has to encounter such a situation.
So, someone wrote a complex data processing pipeline, that read from some tables in a DB, processed the data in small and large ways, finally producing a bunch of variables that were passed into a downstream ML model. No documentation was produced, and the developer had exited the company.
The problem: because of some high stakes issues with said pipeline's results, we needed to (quickly) find out which final variables were drawing information from which initial DB fields. And all we had were a bunch of scattered scripts (Python and Pig I think).
For me that translated to this task: read the scripts to trace a path of successive variable definitions in terms of other variables, eventually connecting each output variable to one or more input column name. It took me 2 long days to trace these paths by manually reading the scripts. The evening sessions were particularly mind-numbing, and involved a few glasses of wine.
I (as well as a few others on the team) spent six months working on a new web app that my company had decided would be the future of the department (my boss said those exact words to me), and that they'd sell to two different major clients (one was a major pharmacy and another was a major health insurance company. You've almost certainly heard of them).
We already had them as clients for other services we provided, this was just something new that the higher ups were sure they'd go for (I think it solved a real need of theirs, their call center people were doing a lot of looking things up manually across like 60 excel spreadsheets during calls, IIRC, and part of what this did was combine all that data into a central area that's easily searchable, plus some other nice-to-have call center features like being to schedule appointments or something, I think).
We got a nearly production-ready MVP in front of them and demo'd it, they seemed interested but we could never get them to sign a contract, for months. One of them eventually decided to recreate something similar in-house and actually had the gall to request that we send them all the business logic we came up with while doing it (for free), the other just never signed a contract.
Well anyway, after failing to get those two clients, the execs must have decided that it was no longer the future of the department, and was quietly shelved.
I might as well not have done anything that six months. Although I did get a bit more comfortable with using Angular at the time, thanks to that project.
That company did that multiple times, btw. Because of the nature of the health industry, and how often they drag their heels for contracts, they often decided they had to start work without a contract in place or else wouldn't have it ready by the annual health insurance open enrollment period, which is when health insurance companies were busiest and where companies that offered services to those companies (our company) made all of their money (think of it kind of like how game companies don't want to miss the holiday season for their new releases). But it resulted in them doing work and not getting paid for it. I wasn't surprised to find out the department was eventually shut down a few years after I quit.
We already had them as clients for other services we provided, this was just something new that the higher ups were sure they'd go for (I think it solved a real need of theirs, their call center people were doing a lot of looking things up manually across like 60 excel spreadsheets during calls, IIRC, and part of what this did was combine all that data into a central area that's easily searchable, plus some other nice-to-have call center features like being to schedule appointments or something, I think).
We got a nearly production-ready MVP in front of them and demo'd it, they seemed interested but we could never get them to sign a contract, for months. One of them eventually decided to recreate something similar in-house and actually had the gall to request that we send them all the business logic we came up with while doing it (for free), the other just never signed a contract.
Well anyway, after failing to get those two clients, the execs must have decided that it was no longer the future of the department, and was quietly shelved.
I might as well not have done anything that six months. Although I did get a bit more comfortable with using Angular at the time, thanks to that project.
That company did that multiple times, btw. Because of the nature of the health industry, and how often they drag their heels for contracts, they often decided they had to start work without a contract in place or else wouldn't have it ready by the annual health insurance open enrollment period, which is when health insurance companies were busiest and where companies that offered services to those companies (our company) made all of their money (think of it kind of like how game companies don't want to miss the holiday season for their new releases). But it resulted in them doing work and not getting paid for it. I wasn't surprised to find out the department was eventually shut down a few years after I quit.
Define "Useless."
My team worked on a project for about 18 months. I won't go into detail about what it was, but it was (and still is) badly-needed.
We worked with the top interaction and graphic design folks in the world for the aesthetics and interaction. We had many meetings, flying the whole team to San Francisco, several times a year.
When the project was in its final testing, the company got cold feet, and canceled the project. I had to lay off two of my engineers.
It would still, to this day, be the best of breed. It was designed about twenty years ago, in the early aughts.
My team worked on a project for about 18 months. I won't go into detail about what it was, but it was (and still is) badly-needed.
We worked with the top interaction and graphic design folks in the world for the aesthetics and interaction. We had many meetings, flying the whole team to San Francisco, several times a year.
When the project was in its final testing, the company got cold feet, and canceled the project. I had to lay off two of my engineers.
It would still, to this day, be the best of breed. It was designed about twenty years ago, in the early aughts.
That sounds fascinating. Have you considered starting your own company around re-creating it?
Not really. It wasn’t the kind of software that could make money. Probably a big reason that this kind of software never improved, over all these years.
It might have been the best of the stuff no one wants to pay for.
It might have been the best of the stuff no one wants to pay for.
And you really leave us hanging here with so little information
They had developed a way to punch people in the face over TCP/IP.
Sadly, I really can’t be more specific than that. Much as I disagreed with their decision, it was theirs to make, and I respected it.
It probably would not have been a money-maker (which was a big reason for the cancellation), and it cost a lot to make. Those top people don’t come cheap.
I am not doing the same kind of thing, these days, but I have yet to see any software, from anyone, to this day, that can do what it did. I know that the interaction people requested a final copy of it, for themselves, as they had done so much work on it, and loved the result so much. It was basically at beta quality, when the project was killed.
It’s not a total loss, though. That project was probably the best learning experience of my career.
It probably would not have been a money-maker (which was a big reason for the cancellation), and it cost a lot to make. Those top people don’t come cheap.
I am not doing the same kind of thing, these days, but I have yet to see any software, from anyone, to this day, that can do what it did. I know that the interaction people requested a final copy of it, for themselves, as they had done so much work on it, and loved the result so much. It was basically at beta quality, when the project was killed.
It’s not a total loss, though. That project was probably the best learning experience of my career.
Not sure what is hindering you talking about it. You seem to be proud of it.
Um ... confidentiality? Maybe it's become passé, these days, but I subscribe to it.
I talk my life and experience. I’m old, and have been at this game for a while, so I’ve seen a fair bit. I don't fluff, brag, or humblebrag. I don't pretend to be what I'm not, and I can back up what I say. Sometimes, I don't think it's necessary or proper to do so (like in this case), and what I claimed was not so outrageous, when you consider that the graphic design agency was Pentagram, and the Interaction design agency was DDO. They did most of the difficult work, and did a great job of it.
Assume whatever you want as my motivation. I don't particularly care. It's a free country.
You seem to know me, better than I know myself, and I guess you're ... um ... proud of that?
I talk my life and experience. I’m old, and have been at this game for a while, so I’ve seen a fair bit. I don't fluff, brag, or humblebrag. I don't pretend to be what I'm not, and I can back up what I say. Sometimes, I don't think it's necessary or proper to do so (like in this case), and what I claimed was not so outrageous, when you consider that the graphic design agency was Pentagram, and the Interaction design agency was DDO. They did most of the difficult work, and did a great job of it.
Assume whatever you want as my motivation. I don't particularly care. It's a free country.
You seem to know me, better than I know myself, and I guess you're ... um ... proud of that?
My reading of what laeri wrote is "you seem to be proud of the work you did on that project so I'm not sure what is hindering you from talking about it".
Not "you seem to be proud of not talking about it".
I'll be generous, and assume that. I tend to get a lot of young folks, telling me that I'm an empty boaster (spoiler: I'm not). Some of them actually seem to be obsessed, which is sort of flattering (I guess).
If that's the case, then I'll certainly apologize. Maybe I'm a cynic.
I don't really have a desire to be BMOC. It's just that this is the only place I engage in any kind of social media, and most folks seem to like what I post.
I've done a lot, over the years. I've worked amongst some of the best and the brightest, and I'm fairly used to being the dumbest guy in the room.
I know that there's many folks, out there, that make me look like a knuckle-dragger, and how ridiculous it is, for me to act like I'm King Shit. Maybe those folks don't feel the need to chime in, around here.
In the case of this posting, a question was asked, and I answered it, in what may actually be too much detail. The company I worked for, had (still has) a real paranoia, when it comes to intellectual property.
I just figured that folks might want to hear stories from the trenches (I have a lot -many that can't be told). That was what I assumed, from the question, and was merely participating in the community.
If that's the case, then I'll certainly apologize. Maybe I'm a cynic.
I don't really have a desire to be BMOC. It's just that this is the only place I engage in any kind of social media, and most folks seem to like what I post.
I've done a lot, over the years. I've worked amongst some of the best and the brightest, and I'm fairly used to being the dumbest guy in the room.
I know that there's many folks, out there, that make me look like a knuckle-dragger, and how ridiculous it is, for me to act like I'm King Shit. Maybe those folks don't feel the need to chime in, around here.
In the case of this posting, a question was asked, and I answered it, in what may actually be too much detail. The company I worked for, had (still has) a real paranoia, when it comes to intellectual property.
I just figured that folks might want to hear stories from the trenches (I have a lot -many that can't be told). That was what I assumed, from the question, and was merely participating in the community.
Well, a good opportunity to say that I don't post here much but I do enjoy your stories.
Quite impressed by your depth and experience in the sector.
You making such a bold statement makes me even more curious.
You making such a bold statement makes me even more curious.
I'm not so impressed by it. I routinely worked with folks that made me look like a piker.
Curiosity is the spice of life. Enjoy!
Curiosity is the spice of life. Enjoy!
Built a beautiful experience focused on serving a completely underserved community.
Won a patent for UX that solved a dicey problem which hadn't been addressed until that point and would impact any user under 18.
Won an accessibility award for design heuristics that hewed to the cutting edge of accessibility not just 'this website works for colorblind users'
The site was destroyed by internal politics. Assigned a URL that made it unmarketable (think... domain.com/projects/projectnamemarketplace) and flailed for 2 years before being sunsetted with nearly no users.
Won a patent for UX that solved a dicey problem which hadn't been addressed until that point and would impact any user under 18.
Won an accessibility award for design heuristics that hewed to the cutting edge of accessibility not just 'this website works for colorblind users'
The site was destroyed by internal politics. Assigned a URL that made it unmarketable (think... domain.com/projects/projectnamemarketplace) and flailed for 2 years before being sunsetted with nearly no users.
I worked for a company that used to resell a single-board computer used for control applications. The vendor was getting antsy because we were always late paying our bills.
Our company owner didn't like their complaints, so I was told to design one that was "better than theirs." That's it. That was the entire spec. OK, I was also told that customer X would like a board that they can program in C (current board had a built-in BASIC interpreter).
I pointed out that I didn't think it would be helpful, since every customer was happy with what we had, and no one was coming close to its limits. It was a small company: I took most of the customer tech support calls, so I was plugged into what they were doing.
I was told to go do it anyway, "we're not going to be held hostage by those guys."
So, I did. I picked a cool new 16-bit Hitachi (now Renesas) chip that had a nice C cross-compiler available and set off on my pet project. My design had more RAM and more storage and a much faster clock. I wrote a simple text-based serial monitor for debugging and uploading code. It was really nice.
As I predicted, however, it didn't sell a single unit. No one cared about all the stuff I added since the existing board already had far more capability than anyone needed anyway and this one, along with the necessary compiler, cost more than 5x the old one.
They showed it to customer X, who said "it's cool, but why would you think we need this?"
Our company owner didn't like their complaints, so I was told to design one that was "better than theirs." That's it. That was the entire spec. OK, I was also told that customer X would like a board that they can program in C (current board had a built-in BASIC interpreter).
I pointed out that I didn't think it would be helpful, since every customer was happy with what we had, and no one was coming close to its limits. It was a small company: I took most of the customer tech support calls, so I was plugged into what they were doing.
I was told to go do it anyway, "we're not going to be held hostage by those guys."
So, I did. I picked a cool new 16-bit Hitachi (now Renesas) chip that had a nice C cross-compiler available and set off on my pet project. My design had more RAM and more storage and a much faster clock. I wrote a simple text-based serial monitor for debugging and uploading code. It was really nice.
As I predicted, however, it didn't sell a single unit. No one cared about all the stuff I added since the existing board already had far more capability than anyone needed anyway and this one, along with the necessary compiler, cost more than 5x the old one.
They showed it to customer X, who said "it's cool, but why would you think we need this?"
Wouldn't "better than theirs" then mean cheaper while still being sufficient?
Perhaps. This is why specifications should be unambiguous.
The only unambiguous specification is code.
> That was the entire spec
To be fair, that's how most ideas start off. Your boss gave to free reign over a new project. You should have been happier than you seemed.
To be fair, that's how most ideas start off. Your boss gave to free reign over a new project. You should have been happier than you seemed.
Oh, I loved the project. I was acutely aware that it was a complete waste of money, but I knew that I worked for idiots and I rode that train all the way until it finally derailed.
I just wish that I was able to get all the stuff out of there that they promised me before the Sheriff locked the doors!
I just wish that I was able to get all the stuff out of there that they promised me before the Sheriff locked the doors!
As an analyst, I've worked on my fair share of projects that have never seen the light of day, and essentially just ended up in a black hole.
A scenario like that typically goes like this:
- Client orders an analysis of something. They want all corners covered, and because they'll use it as evidence/argument/pitch or whatever, you're likely working on a tight deadline.
- You (and others) work tirelessly through the nights, pour hundreds of hours into the analysis, do get it finished before deadline. Everything needs to be perfect and bullet-proof.
- Client is presented with the delivery, skims through it, and thanks you for the work.
- The client changes their mind / abandons it all-together.
Those projects rarely feel rewarding, as you're mostly just fighting the clock, and doing lots of boring routine work. And when it turns out that you and your team are the only ones that will ever read the analysis, that kind of just makes it feel useless.
A scenario like that typically goes like this:
- Client orders an analysis of something. They want all corners covered, and because they'll use it as evidence/argument/pitch or whatever, you're likely working on a tight deadline.
- You (and others) work tirelessly through the nights, pour hundreds of hours into the analysis, do get it finished before deadline. Everything needs to be perfect and bullet-proof.
- Client is presented with the delivery, skims through it, and thanks you for the work.
- The client changes their mind / abandons it all-together.
Those projects rarely feel rewarding, as you're mostly just fighting the clock, and doing lots of boring routine work. And when it turns out that you and your team are the only ones that will ever read the analysis, that kind of just makes it feel useless.
As a manager, when this happens I tell my staff that the sleeping firefighter performs valuable work.
Sometimes management decides it’s worth it to spend staff time on something even though there’s a non-zero probability it will never be used. If there’s no fire during the firefighter’s shift, we don’t conclude her time was wasted and that we should never have had the firefighter.
Sometimes management decides it’s worth it to spend staff time on something even though there’s a non-zero probability it will never be used. If there’s no fire during the firefighter’s shift, we don’t conclude her time was wasted and that we should never have had the firefighter.
One of my major tricks is to just wait before doing things. And ask If doing this should be done instead of that.
this helps to eliminate greatly this scenario.
this helps to eliminate greatly this scenario.
Typical Wally!
(from Dilbert)
I once spent months working on an expert witness report for a high profile tech industry trial--one of 10 or so written for "our" side. Never got used because of some things that happened in the course of the lawsuit.
It was a nice change of pace, paid well, and was able to reuse snippets of material here and there over the years, so not totally useless but never got used for its intended purpose.
Of course, I've also been on projects that were just canceled.
It was a nice change of pace, paid well, and was able to reuse snippets of material here and there over the years, so not totally useless but never got used for its intended purpose.
Of course, I've also been on projects that were just canceled.
The current CTO of a publicly traded company had my entire engineering team rewrite an <anonymized internal tool>. Mind you, the current generation of the <anonymized internal tool> is completely fine, and in fact a massive improvement from our 1st and 2nd gen version. About a year into that completely useless project, the CTO lays off 2/3 of the team (including the original authors), reorgs another team into our team, and the latest gen <anonymized internal tool> is a complete pile of trash. I left the team a few months ago when I realized it wasn't worth the head ache of dealing with the terrible CTO, the literal human centipede which is the leadership chain, and the sales bro turned product manager.
Corporate users of 3G dongles used to rack up enormous charges while roaming. They’d get hit with five-figure bills and complain to their carrier that they didn’t warn them, and often the carrier would end up swallowing the charge, even though they were rarely marking up the costs heavily. I worked on a project with a major carrier to enable companies to monitor and alert on cost overruns, and shut off devices in some cases. But before we launched, the EU basically cracked down on the underlying charges and made roaming far less stressful for everybody. Shame, because we had quite a nice end to end setup that would test real world usage on many combinations of laptops and dongles and ensure everything triggered properly.
I suppose the tool would still be useful for EU -> not EU roamers? Interestingly Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway are not part of the EU but I know my German SIM card works there with its home tariff, but Switzerland is still the holdout. EDIT: Wikipedia says Monaco, Andorra and San Marino also don't have free roaming...
Also, did this EU directive come as a surprise? AFAIK they move at glacial pace and carriers should've seen it coming...
Also, did this EU directive come as a surprise? AFAIK they move at glacial pace and carriers should've seen it coming...
It probably would still be useful - even quite recently a UK politician got into hot water running up a large bill on his work iPad, I’ll admit I’ve not followed the industry for the last decade as anything but a consumer, You also see the same dynamic with cloud costs where this certainly is active area for startups. Anywhere you can see massive bill shock, you have both sides of the market motivated to fix it, because the provider often ends up absorbing the costs when the customer complains.
Liechtenstein, Norway, and Iceland are part of the EEA, where 95% of EU law still applies.
I currently work on building an open PCB for translating Android headphone remote signaling to Apple remote signaling resuming the awesome work of David Carne[1].
Basically it is a circuit where you could use any Android inear Headphone with remote buttons on any Apple device with Audio Jack - a TRRS Plug - TRRS Jack translation layer between the 220Ω/660Ω vol+ and vol- signaling on Android to the proprietary Apple ultrasonic chirp protocol.
Probably nobody (besides me) will ever require this, because everyone just uses Bluetooth these days and noone else uses the iPod Nano 7g :-)
1: https://tinymicros.com/wiki/Apple_iPod_Remote_Protocol
Basically it is a circuit where you could use any Android inear Headphone with remote buttons on any Apple device with Audio Jack - a TRRS Plug - TRRS Jack translation layer between the 220Ω/660Ω vol+ and vol- signaling on Android to the proprietary Apple ultrasonic chirp protocol.
Probably nobody (besides me) will ever require this, because everyone just uses Bluetooth these days and noone else uses the iPod Nano 7g :-)
1: https://tinymicros.com/wiki/Apple_iPod_Remote_Protocol
[deleted]
Digg v4. I started at Digg as employee 30 or something close to that. When v4 was being designed I was (among others) very much not supportive of the concept. I did the work they asked of me and about ~4 months before launch I was fired.
Some Digg colleagues reached out asking why I decided to leave… since that is what digg internally announced. This is when I understand a number of others before me were also fired and not just “deciding to pursue other opportunities”.
EDIT: to be clear I don’t fault them for firing me. People not onboard for a decision made by leadership in a startup are fair game to be fired. You need people to believe in the product and I definitely wasn’t a believer.
Anyway I had 60-90days (can’t remember deadline) to exercise my options or let them expire. I decided to let them expire since I thought v4 was a bad direction. Honestly I was very stressed about this decision but I went with my gut. Saved me half a house worth of money.
Some Digg colleagues reached out asking why I decided to leave… since that is what digg internally announced. This is when I understand a number of others before me were also fired and not just “deciding to pursue other opportunities”.
EDIT: to be clear I don’t fault them for firing me. People not onboard for a decision made by leadership in a startup are fair game to be fired. You need people to believe in the product and I definitely wasn’t a believer.
Anyway I had 60-90days (can’t remember deadline) to exercise my options or let them expire. I decided to let them expire since I thought v4 was a bad direction. Honestly I was very stressed about this decision but I went with my gut. Saved me half a house worth of money.
You could write a memoire with more details in 10-20 years and publish it.
It would be nice who pushed for this, why, didnt they understand that it will be a disaster? Didnt they understand power users? Even moderation issues, but (as far as I remember) digg was less brigaded politically than what happens nowadays that internet matured (state actor level).
Was digg even a startup at that point? It was a full mature website? Or at least gave such impression.
Maybe the money was "low" - as far as I remember Google wanted to buy it for 90M, but come on, those billion websties were mostly written off, since they are impossible to monetize.
It would be nice who pushed for this, why, didnt they understand that it will be a disaster? Didnt they understand power users? Even moderation issues, but (as far as I remember) digg was less brigaded politically than what happens nowadays that internet matured (state actor level).
Was digg even a startup at that point? It was a full mature website? Or at least gave such impression.
Maybe the money was "low" - as far as I remember Google wanted to buy it for 90M, but come on, those billion websties were mostly written off, since they are impossible to monetize.
At prevJob when we were in early stage I remember building a ton of features from the ground up which were useful to our end users.
Post IPO all the late stage jokers from companies like MSFT and AMZN started coming in and I remember the torturous bike shedding and endless documentation for doing simple stupid shit like adding a single attribute to a data model or changing border radius on a button for the design system.
Added literally no value for the users.
Actual user issues were deemed “not important” because they were a bit complex or some PM with the right credentials but none of the empathy would think it’s low priority.
Not to mention the endless self patting on the back and “psychological safety” type people who showed up that spent more time doing everything but the work.
Meanwhile our poor users would suffer in their already difficult jobs and get an unwanted UX redesign instead.
Honestly made me lose respect for FANG crowd. I’ll rather work at startups or my own company than work at some late stage place. What a nightmare.
Post IPO all the late stage jokers from companies like MSFT and AMZN started coming in and I remember the torturous bike shedding and endless documentation for doing simple stupid shit like adding a single attribute to a data model or changing border radius on a button for the design system.
Added literally no value for the users.
Actual user issues were deemed “not important” because they were a bit complex or some PM with the right credentials but none of the empathy would think it’s low priority.
Not to mention the endless self patting on the back and “psychological safety” type people who showed up that spent more time doing everything but the work.
Meanwhile our poor users would suffer in their already difficult jobs and get an unwanted UX redesign instead.
Honestly made me lose respect for FANG crowd. I’ll rather work at startups or my own company than work at some late stage place. What a nightmare.
So, I once had a contract at an ad agency, which was getting into the business of making software for food-related clients. Our first customer of this sort, was a chain of cupcake stores. Their CEO had just come in from a hamburger chain, and wanted to replace their (functional, bespoke) website and factory (i.e. kitchen) management software, with an outside off-the-shelf solution. We were to make the website and the glue logic to the outside product they had chosen.
The cupcake company's CTO took paternity leave shortly after the project began.
We asked about the back-office software, which interfaced with the kitchens, on a couple of occasions, and were told not to worry about it, the third party standard solution would handle that.
So, with a week to go, the cupcake CEO finally shows the product to his regional managers. They ask, "where's the part that tells us to put make this much of this kind of frosting, and when in the day to do it? and make this much of red velvet cake, starting three hours before it's needed?"
It turns out, the third party solution was for sandwich and burger places, where you would just make the food when it was ordered. For cupcakes, it needed to combine the needs of multiple different orders, take into account how many hours it would take to make each flavor of cake and frosting, and tell the kitchen staff what to do, and when. The cupcake CEO had only ever run a burger place, he had no idea about any of this, and didn't want anybody like the CTO telling him his idea wouldn't work.
So, he asked us if we could update our glue logic to also talk to the old software, so that it would continue to run the kitchens, while the new website took the orders. We said sure, here's how much it would cost.
Oh, he said, we wanted it as part of the previous quote.
The final meeting, wherein we explained that we had done what he had asked us to, was not attended by the cupcake CEO, he sent his new CTO (the old one had quit right after his paternity leave was up). Every permanent employee of my company slipped out, and I, the contractor, was left for the last part, to explain that no, we would not be building any software not in the original quote, for free.
The entire project went into the dump. The former CTO of the cupcake company, started work for the company that had made the original, bespoke software that was still running things.
The cupcake company's CTO took paternity leave shortly after the project began.
We asked about the back-office software, which interfaced with the kitchens, on a couple of occasions, and were told not to worry about it, the third party standard solution would handle that.
So, with a week to go, the cupcake CEO finally shows the product to his regional managers. They ask, "where's the part that tells us to put make this much of this kind of frosting, and when in the day to do it? and make this much of red velvet cake, starting three hours before it's needed?"
It turns out, the third party solution was for sandwich and burger places, where you would just make the food when it was ordered. For cupcakes, it needed to combine the needs of multiple different orders, take into account how many hours it would take to make each flavor of cake and frosting, and tell the kitchen staff what to do, and when. The cupcake CEO had only ever run a burger place, he had no idea about any of this, and didn't want anybody like the CTO telling him his idea wouldn't work.
So, he asked us if we could update our glue logic to also talk to the old software, so that it would continue to run the kitchens, while the new website took the orders. We said sure, here's how much it would cost.
Oh, he said, we wanted it as part of the previous quote.
The final meeting, wherein we explained that we had done what he had asked us to, was not attended by the cupcake CEO, he sent his new CTO (the old one had quit right after his paternity leave was up). Every permanent employee of my company slipped out, and I, the contractor, was left for the last part, to explain that no, we would not be building any software not in the original quote, for free.
The entire project went into the dump. The former CTO of the cupcake company, started work for the company that had made the original, bespoke software that was still running things.
I spent the past two and a half years building prototype features for a large internal application. One month ago, the CFO decided that as a part of organizational restructuring, the company will no longer invest in the application. New development on it is ending, and the entire application may potentially be deprecated at some point in the future in favor of cheap dashboards.
I am being moved to the team that builds the cheap dashboards (I'm not happy about it). Among all the prototype work I did, only one significant project has made it into production - the others were continually iterated on for a couple of years, and though some of them have a highly engaged and appreciative beta userbase within the company, I am not allowed to do much more development on them, and they will be taken out of my hands at some point and passed off to other teams.
I am being moved to the team that builds the cheap dashboards (I'm not happy about it). Among all the prototype work I did, only one significant project has made it into production - the others were continually iterated on for a couple of years, and though some of them have a highly engaged and appreciative beta userbase within the company, I am not allowed to do much more development on them, and they will be taken out of my hands at some point and passed off to other teams.
Prototypes mean nothing.
I've tried to explain prototypes, draft/paper versions. People just nod and wonder why they can't use it yet. They live in their bubble and you live in yours
To be honest if you made 10 prototypes it just looks like you can't finish anything. Not that you're a genius problem solver.
Make something that barely works and then hand it over to them and don't look back. Ship it.
I've tried to explain prototypes, draft/paper versions. People just nod and wonder why they can't use it yet. They live in their bubble and you live in yours
To be honest if you made 10 prototypes it just looks like you can't finish anything. Not that you're a genius problem solver.
Make something that barely works and then hand it over to them and don't look back. Ship it.
The only prototypes are extremely personal. Once you show it to anyone else, it’s production.
I'm sorry to say this, but I think you're going to be laid off at some point.
You're right! The company is very openly continuing layoffs for the next 2 years, so I don't have much faith in the team I was moved to sticking around for much longer. I fixed up my resume and started applying elsewhere the week after everyone I work with was laid off. The job search is going well, fortunately.
> So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time like it?
When this happens, look at the money. Who is paying for it, how are they paying for it, and can the money be used for other projects/programs.
I've been in similar situations where work had to be done on X even though there was little work to do or no point, but there was money. Y had more value, if we could work on it. It was funded from a different source which didn't have money (or did, but not enough to bring us over) and we couldn't use money from X to support Y.
It's a very frustrating situation, fortunately not one I'm in anymore.
When this happens, look at the money. Who is paying for it, how are they paying for it, and can the money be used for other projects/programs.
I've been in similar situations where work had to be done on X even though there was little work to do or no point, but there was money. Y had more value, if we could work on it. It was funded from a different source which didn't have money (or did, but not enough to bring us over) and we couldn't use money from X to support Y.
It's a very frustrating situation, fortunately not one I'm in anymore.
Definitely look at money, but also look at social power. Humans are primates, and primates have meticulously maintained status hierarchies. Actions driven by that may not "make sense". "Sense" came way later and it's still trying to catch up.
And one general rule I love here is POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
If you can set aside the nominal purpose of the system for a bit, you can start to see a lot of the machinery underneath.
And one general rule I love here is POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
If you can set aside the nominal purpose of the system for a bit, you can start to see a lot of the machinery underneath.
In the late 90s I had a short stint doing freelance work for a "stupid money" investor who funded the work of this weirdo post-modernist programmer/philosopher claiming to be developing something akin, I guess, to what we would now call a deep learning system.
The claim was that the system this person was developing, when introduced to a lot of information, would emerge with "interesting" behaviour and insight. The problem was that nobody except for the author knew how to interface with that system, which was just a dense and highly idiosyncratic codebase in C manipulating data structures. And so my role was to learn about that system and build a UI that will allow mere mortals to use it.
After a few frustrating and very confusing weeks not really managing to understand what that system actually does (and therefore what an appropriate user interface would be) I finally got to read through the code (taking advantage of the main author, who normally guarded his creation and didn't allow anyone to look at it too closely, being absent for a few days). It quickly became clear to me that this system doesn't really do anything useful at all. It was more post-modern poetry than code.
When I tried to talk to the investor about the situation I was made to understand that this is not something we're going to be discussing openly. I guess he sort of knew but for whatever reasons liked keeping things ambiguous. In order to be able to deliver _something_ for my fees, I prepared a cute little Windows UI that technically connected to that system but really only used it as a random number generator, had some buttons and sliders, and presented all kinds of cool graphics. They were very happy with the result and I soon moved on to other works.
The claim was that the system this person was developing, when introduced to a lot of information, would emerge with "interesting" behaviour and insight. The problem was that nobody except for the author knew how to interface with that system, which was just a dense and highly idiosyncratic codebase in C manipulating data structures. And so my role was to learn about that system and build a UI that will allow mere mortals to use it.
After a few frustrating and very confusing weeks not really managing to understand what that system actually does (and therefore what an appropriate user interface would be) I finally got to read through the code (taking advantage of the main author, who normally guarded his creation and didn't allow anyone to look at it too closely, being absent for a few days). It quickly became clear to me that this system doesn't really do anything useful at all. It was more post-modern poetry than code.
When I tried to talk to the investor about the situation I was made to understand that this is not something we're going to be discussing openly. I guess he sort of knew but for whatever reasons liked keeping things ambiguous. In order to be able to deliver _something_ for my fees, I prepared a cute little Windows UI that technically connected to that system but really only used it as a random number generator, had some buttons and sliders, and presented all kinds of cool graphics. They were very happy with the result and I soon moved on to other works.
Why was the investor okay with this?
My guess is this was small change for him and he enjoyed the adventure somehow.
I made an app some years ago that let you order custom song books with chords (physical books), to play the guitar / sing along at campfires etc. I integrated the app with Spotify, a printing API, stripe, and ordered a few books for myself (basically you could import some Spotify playlists or just add some songs), compile it into a book and then place your order and get it delivered at home… all automated. I thought I could turn this into a nice SaaS, until I was told this is illegal as the lyrics and tabs/chords are protected by copyright. I couldn’t find more motivation after this major roadblock so I gave up. It’s still up and running, but only I have access to the printing feature. The name which I thought was clever was actually kinda confusing to people (lyrink.com as in lyrics + ink) and always autocorrected to “lyrics”. I worked on this printing feature for many months. There’s some really interesting programming challenges with trying to fit dynamic content from the internet, with chords and lyrics (where the chords have to be placed correctly near the lyrics) etc. into a nicely formatted physical book (without using a monospaced font)
Well… yes, of course those things are copyrighted. I'm a bit surprised you didn't foresee that issue.
But still, it sounds like you learned a lot about Stripe and that other API. Those are good skills to have. If nothing else you've padded your resume quite strongly, so the project wasn't entirely for nothing.
But still, it sounds like you learned a lot about Stripe and that other API. Those are good skills to have. If nothing else you've padded your resume quite strongly, so the project wasn't entirely for nothing.
If you made it free and have it spit out a pdf that nefarious users could realize could be bound easily …
I joined a startup once where everybody seemed to be working on something completely different.
One project was an eBay tool, another was a chat assistant, another was an energy comparison tool...
The CEO was never in the office, she was always flying around the world with her daughter (given a made-up C title) visiting CEOs of large companies and throwing out numerous hooks to see who would bite.
I very quickly saw through this whole charade and quit a month after joining.
Some years later she managed to wangle a sale via a well known tech company she was previously a C level for. Who knows what it was that she ended up selling ...
One project was an eBay tool, another was a chat assistant, another was an energy comparison tool...
The CEO was never in the office, she was always flying around the world with her daughter (given a made-up C title) visiting CEOs of large companies and throwing out numerous hooks to see who would bite.
I very quickly saw through this whole charade and quit a month after joining.
Some years later she managed to wangle a sale via a well known tech company she was previously a C level for. Who knows what it was that she ended up selling ...
Was it her only business / source of income?
I know a gentleman who does something similar even though a large portion of his wealth is in the real estate industry. His tech gains are just from a network of friends that gave money to his company and lip service to "acquisition."
I know a gentleman who does something similar even though a large portion of his wealth is in the real estate industry. His tech gains are just from a network of friends that gave money to his company and lip service to "acquisition."
I worked for ten months for a bank, in a team of about ten people (mostly external consultants, so pretty expensive), to build some new feature of their customer website. The feature had been proposed as part of some internal initiative and was pretty much useless. From the start it was clear that the project manager hadn't understood at all the concept of what we were asked to build, and even after several months and a lot of explanation he was still proposing stuff that showed the same misunderstanding of the concept; the feature consisted of all of three or four views, but the designs were constantly changing (despite being almost childishly simple), the huge monorepo was so badly set up that each hot-reload took several minutes, and the backend needed to go through an insane amount of bureaucracy.
In the end, we managed to produce three working web pages, and then the team was disbanded and the project shelved. The whole thing might have costed the company a million or more. Pretty sad, but now I tell people that I know why the interest rates of their bank accounts are zero.
In the end, we managed to produce three working web pages, and then the team was disbanded and the project shelved. The whole thing might have costed the company a million or more. Pretty sad, but now I tell people that I know why the interest rates of their bank accounts are zero.
It doesn’t take long for the left hand to not know what the right hand is doing, or even that there is another hand out there doing hand things. It’s hard to completely not care, but detaching from it to a reasonable degree is the only way to keep going in this career for the long haul, because you will repeatedly be asked to do seemingly dumb things. It’s on someone else’s dollar, if they want dumb thing give them dumb thing, and sleep soundly at night knowing that you were paid pretty well to do it.
Sometimes you have a voice in the room to prevent dumb things from being done. Use it if you have it, by all means. If you don’t get heard it’s a waste of time and mental health.
Sometimes you have a voice in the room to prevent dumb things from being done. Use it if you have it, by all means. If you don’t get heard it’s a waste of time and mental health.
I had a boss at one of my last gigs who would cook up the most impossibly over-engineered (and badly designed and rarely worked) projects ever.
The worst one ever was he wanted to build a kubernetes observability platform from scratch. Specifically, we wanted to filter our application logs for errors and be able to find them. There's a million out of the box ways to do this with free and enterprise tooling, like EFK/ELK setups, datadog, etc. But no. We wanted to do this from scratch.
Well, fine I thought. Good resume builder. His approach was roughly this from what I recall:
- On an EC2 instance we will set up permissions so it can access the control plane of our entire global EKS infrastructure (like 4 dozen large clusters hosting 10k+ containers)
- We will run a series of bash scripts in a background process that hits the control plane every few seconds with Kubectl to get raw pod logs and store them for analysis/error grepping (probably someone is laughing already)
- We would use a similar series of bash scripts to automatically generate a mostly static website that would link to the paths of log files deemed "problematic" in some insane filepath system that was approximately organized by timestamp, the idea being if you thought an incident happened in Cluster XYZ at 11am you'd navigate through this web of raw log files and find the directory that had the precise timestamp you needed (linux epoch of course, not mm/dd/YY)
- Because new files were generated all the time, like every few seconds, we also had to periodically "refresh" the site by rebuilding the static site with all the new links
All told I think it ended up being some absolutely psychotic mess of 50+ scripts and over 15,000 lines of almost all bash and some Go templating.
Surprisingly, it did what it was supposed to, it just looked terrible and had an obviously bad UX. Luckily before we could show it to anyone important the exact thing happened I had warned about and we started crashing some of the clusters' control planes from the sheer number of requests we were sending to it. He panicked and told me to shut it down.
I'm sure I don't even need to go into detail how useless this is. I did become a wizard with kubectl, however, so it was valuable to me. Not so much to the company.
The worst one ever was he wanted to build a kubernetes observability platform from scratch. Specifically, we wanted to filter our application logs for errors and be able to find them. There's a million out of the box ways to do this with free and enterprise tooling, like EFK/ELK setups, datadog, etc. But no. We wanted to do this from scratch.
Well, fine I thought. Good resume builder. His approach was roughly this from what I recall:
- On an EC2 instance we will set up permissions so it can access the control plane of our entire global EKS infrastructure (like 4 dozen large clusters hosting 10k+ containers)
- We will run a series of bash scripts in a background process that hits the control plane every few seconds with Kubectl to get raw pod logs and store them for analysis/error grepping (probably someone is laughing already)
- We would use a similar series of bash scripts to automatically generate a mostly static website that would link to the paths of log files deemed "problematic" in some insane filepath system that was approximately organized by timestamp, the idea being if you thought an incident happened in Cluster XYZ at 11am you'd navigate through this web of raw log files and find the directory that had the precise timestamp you needed (linux epoch of course, not mm/dd/YY)
- Because new files were generated all the time, like every few seconds, we also had to periodically "refresh" the site by rebuilding the static site with all the new links
All told I think it ended up being some absolutely psychotic mess of 50+ scripts and over 15,000 lines of almost all bash and some Go templating.
Surprisingly, it did what it was supposed to, it just looked terrible and had an obviously bad UX. Luckily before we could show it to anyone important the exact thing happened I had warned about and we started crashing some of the clusters' control planes from the sheer number of requests we were sending to it. He panicked and told me to shut it down.
I'm sure I don't even need to go into detail how useless this is. I did become a wizard with kubectl, however, so it was valuable to me. Not so much to the company.
we also had to periodically "refresh" the site by rebuilding the static site with all the new links
Oh god dammit that's where you finally pissed me off. Lol.
Oh god dammit that's where you finally pissed me off. Lol.
Well, this sounds like the opposite of overengineered, but definitely terrible
Sounds like the infrastructure was certainly overengineered, the actual app not so much. Under-engineered, over-built.
I worked at a place for a few months where they had this very complicated K8s, Argo Workflows architecture for processing some Bioinformatics data. Felt cool when I joined, but it clearly was way over-engineered.
I started with a proposal on how to simplify it and went about developing a POC. However, a couple of months in, I realized that the company actually had NO customers for this. And multiple engineers had worked multiple years to get this to the stage it was. I had 0 motivation to do anything after this, and left soon afterwards. I think they are still working on it!
I started with a proposal on how to simplify it and went about developing a POC. However, a couple of months in, I realized that the company actually had NO customers for this. And multiple engineers had worked multiple years to get this to the stage it was. I had 0 motivation to do anything after this, and left soon afterwards. I think they are still working on it!
What was your proposal?
Worked 5 years as a contractor for a system made to be used for all of the healthcare in a country. Payed by tax payer money. Some serious money. I never understood what the system actually was supposed to do during those 5 years. Started as some custom authorization server for new healthcare laws and then ended up as some kind of desktop app that had a launcher to launch apps. No idea what the purpose really was and heard it got cancelled a couple of years after i left.
I was working in a a 2-3 men group, which the manager of the tram directly reports to the big boss for the company.
The so called "tech dev team" are responsible for all sorts of tasks, for example exploring new tech, prototyping, supporting product team with optimization or content production.
We had been supporting system design and development in a new Unity (game) project for half a year, things were fine, and then the project got frozen/archived/cancelled.
And the reason was simple, our big boss wanted to svalr new heights! Something just like the one he made ~20 years ago and still feeding the company. He wanted to concentrate resources on this new ambitious project of his.
So that was it, the end of a 10+ men project, we got assigned to different task then. And then again. Then again.
Sometimes we just experiented techs. Sometimes we worked on projects that is not promising at all from our view. Sometimes we took over a good project and altered it into a abomination.
As my first job in my career, I'd say it certainly harmed my passion. I really really hope I can works on something poilsitively meaningful and impactful/useful to the world or even just certain audience.
I am probably only qualified as junior go/.net developer, but if there's such opportunity please let me know.
The so called "tech dev team" are responsible for all sorts of tasks, for example exploring new tech, prototyping, supporting product team with optimization or content production.
We had been supporting system design and development in a new Unity (game) project for half a year, things were fine, and then the project got frozen/archived/cancelled.
And the reason was simple, our big boss wanted to svalr new heights! Something just like the one he made ~20 years ago and still feeding the company. He wanted to concentrate resources on this new ambitious project of his.
So that was it, the end of a 10+ men project, we got assigned to different task then. And then again. Then again.
Sometimes we just experiented techs. Sometimes we worked on projects that is not promising at all from our view. Sometimes we took over a good project and altered it into a abomination.
As my first job in my career, I'd say it certainly harmed my passion. I really really hope I can works on something poilsitively meaningful and impactful/useful to the world or even just certain audience.
I am probably only qualified as junior go/.net developer, but if there's such opportunity please let me know.
> Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor
--
Been there, got the T-shirt. Had the "sysadmin" job title and everything. And then the Board of Directors announced they had bought a complete data backup "solution", and I was to implement it forthwith.
Had anyone bothered to ask me, I could have told them that their "solution", being a Windows-based software package, wouldn't run on their database servers, which ran SCO Unix. Which was quite adequately backed up with tar and cpio, and rotating off-site tape storage.
Later, the desktop support group was surprised by the delivery of a couple of pallets of Compaq laptops and desktops with Windows 3. This was before "internet" was really a thing. The desktop guys set them all up, made sure they could log in to the Novell servers, and went home. However, the main application the clerks used was on the SCO boxes, which were accessed with NCSA Telnet. The Compaq machines had Ethernet ports, but their customized Compaq Windows version didn't have TCP/IP drivers, so the next morning they were frantically putting the old computers back so people could work.
Had anyone bothered to ask me, I could have told them that their "solution", being a Windows-based software package, wouldn't run on their database servers, which ran SCO Unix. Which was quite adequately backed up with tar and cpio, and rotating off-site tape storage.
Later, the desktop support group was surprised by the delivery of a couple of pallets of Compaq laptops and desktops with Windows 3. This was before "internet" was really a thing. The desktop guys set them all up, made sure they could log in to the Novell servers, and went home. However, the main application the clerks used was on the SCO boxes, which were accessed with NCSA Telnet. The Compaq machines had Ethernet ports, but their customized Compaq Windows version didn't have TCP/IP drivers, so the next morning they were frantically putting the old computers back so people could work.
Gotta love decisions from above without asking anyone doing the actual work with said tech/product.
I worked at a company that bought 2 oracle servers (racks? Not sure, over $200K though, over 10 years ago now) because it was going to magically make everything better. We were on mysql at the time and there was a large effort to rewrite all our table/column names to work with oracle (there was some stupid length limit and maybe some characters weren’t allowed). The project was abandoned and the exec who signed off on it had left to screw up some other company.
It was many years before we were able to reverse the name changes (they made writing queries miserable and the names were confusing due to the abbreviations or lack of vowels) and more years still after that before we managed to turn those racks collecting dust into NAS storage for backups.
I worked at a company that bought 2 oracle servers (racks? Not sure, over $200K though, over 10 years ago now) because it was going to magically make everything better. We were on mysql at the time and there was a large effort to rewrite all our table/column names to work with oracle (there was some stupid length limit and maybe some characters weren’t allowed). The project was abandoned and the exec who signed off on it had left to screw up some other company.
It was many years before we were able to reverse the name changes (they made writing queries miserable and the names were confusing due to the abbreviations or lack of vowels) and more years still after that before we managed to turn those racks collecting dust into NAS storage for backups.
Ha, sounds like you've been working on this pointless thing for what, 4-6 weeks?
When I worked for my country's defence organisation, I was the "primary development resource" on a project to rebuild the login page for their online services portal. I was allocated to this task full time for 14 months. I got some designs from the UI people, did a real shit job of turning it into a functioning page in angular in about a month (I'm not a frontend dev, they never asked me if I even knew what angular was, the job just landed on my desk one day), copied some npm magic to make it all render out to a single HTML file that could be installed in their fancy super security authentication system. For the remaining time I just attended a few hours of meetings a week and answered a handful of emails each week, maybe 2-3hrs of work a week, while a bunch of shit went on in the background to approve and document the work (stuff I didn't have the right title to do).
I left that job three years ago, the login page for the online portal is still the one that was built in 2003.
I'm fairly sure the entire point of the massive overallocation was for $CORP I was employed by to extract more money from $GOV, at the cost of a fraction of that paying my salary.
When I worked for my country's defence organisation, I was the "primary development resource" on a project to rebuild the login page for their online services portal. I was allocated to this task full time for 14 months. I got some designs from the UI people, did a real shit job of turning it into a functioning page in angular in about a month (I'm not a frontend dev, they never asked me if I even knew what angular was, the job just landed on my desk one day), copied some npm magic to make it all render out to a single HTML file that could be installed in their fancy super security authentication system. For the remaining time I just attended a few hours of meetings a week and answered a handful of emails each week, maybe 2-3hrs of work a week, while a bunch of shit went on in the background to approve and document the work (stuff I didn't have the right title to do).
I left that job three years ago, the login page for the online portal is still the one that was built in 2003.
I'm fairly sure the entire point of the massive overallocation was for $CORP I was employed by to extract more money from $GOV, at the cost of a fraction of that paying my salary.
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.
The real goal is learning to sniff i2c though.
That's far from useless though. There have been times where I've wished that I had an I2C expert so I could say "this thing is acting weird. Here's a bus analyzer and there's the code. Go fix it."
There's definitely a difference between the utility of the final project/product and the utility to you personally based on what you learned/had fun with/got paid for along the way.
Very good point!
Yeah, that's like... the polar opposite of this post. Frankly, that sounds both fun and useful.
This is actually the most useful thing I’ve read in this whole comment section so far.
Thank you for reverse-engineering proprietary hardware and writing integration drivers for it. The world needs people like you.
Thank you for reverse-engineering proprietary hardware and writing integration drivers for it. The world needs people like you.
Long ago I wrote an FPGA image to convert I2C to serial for long-term logging, to catch that rare, once a week event:
https://github.com/jhallen/i2cmon
You capture the serial using minicom log to file or similar, then you can peruse the log at your leisure.
https://github.com/jhallen/i2cmon
You capture the serial using minicom log to file or similar, then you can peruse the log at your leisure.
Something like buspirate might work
You may be interested in a friend's product:
https://github.com/tjhorner/upsy-desky
https://github.com/tjhorner/upsy-desky
I was at a fairly well-known company that was on a downward financial trajectory. The company had some solid products that customers loved, and that was gaining new users, but the overall management of the company had led it to have an enormous, unsustainable amount of debt and expenses. People were headed for the exits, and I was making my own plans to follow, but before I did so management had me switch on to another project.
The project I _had_ been on was central to the successful product line. I had built out a central part of that system and was proud of how well it worked and seeing the usage and revenue growth from it. The _new_ product was... changing the payment processing system we used for accepting credit cards. I mean, sure, a more flexible payment processing flow is a helpful improvement, but at a time of existential risk to the company, _this_ is what we should be focused on?
And actually, it was more than that -- the new flow had some kind of complex integration with a system provided by an outside vendor. And involved lots of sync meetings. Lots and lots of sync meetings. And every meeting would involve explanations by contractors (who seemed to multiply by the week) as to why we were behind schedule, and questions by me trying to get some documentation on the API I was supposed to interface with, and explanations of why the people on this call didn't have that info but I should set up a meeting with a different team of the vendor...
I assume there was some kind of kick back or other tie between the execs who approved this program and the vendor, as this project seemed more about pumping money out of a dying company and into this outside vendor than any kind of rational business strategy. I did move on after too long, and that previous employer is now officially bankrupt.
The project I _had_ been on was central to the successful product line. I had built out a central part of that system and was proud of how well it worked and seeing the usage and revenue growth from it. The _new_ product was... changing the payment processing system we used for accepting credit cards. I mean, sure, a more flexible payment processing flow is a helpful improvement, but at a time of existential risk to the company, _this_ is what we should be focused on?
And actually, it was more than that -- the new flow had some kind of complex integration with a system provided by an outside vendor. And involved lots of sync meetings. Lots and lots of sync meetings. And every meeting would involve explanations by contractors (who seemed to multiply by the week) as to why we were behind schedule, and questions by me trying to get some documentation on the API I was supposed to interface with, and explanations of why the people on this call didn't have that info but I should set up a meeting with a different team of the vendor...
I assume there was some kind of kick back or other tie between the execs who approved this program and the vendor, as this project seemed more about pumping money out of a dying company and into this outside vendor than any kind of rational business strategy. I did move on after too long, and that previous employer is now officially bankrupt.
> The thing is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this guy in my team. Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios.
IMO only this part is useless. I have been through this and it feels horrible. sometimes its waste of time arguing with people so I just do what the reviewer says even though it doesn't make any sense.
IMO only this part is useless. I have been through this and it feels horrible. sometimes its waste of time arguing with people so I just do what the reviewer says even though it doesn't make any sense.
Some years ago, a colleague literally spent all night in the office, on the 31st of March, implementing clippy for another third party commercial application (not MS Office) that was heavily used by the company and across that industry.
He inspired me to take April Fool's seriously. I've since changed industries but last year I jumped on the AI bandwagon with https://chatellite.space and this year a nod to a popular mobile game https://flappysat.space .
Functionally completely useless but they taught me a lot and made some people laugh.
He inspired me to take April Fool's seriously. I've since changed industries but last year I jumped on the AI bandwagon with https://chatellite.space and this year a nod to a popular mobile game https://flappysat.space .
Functionally completely useless but they taught me a lot and made some people laugh.
Wow, I once added clippy to a website I worked on too :)
It wasn't an all-nighter, though! I used clippy.js, so it was just a few lines!
It wasn't an all-nighter, though! I used clippy.js, so it was just a few lines!
Ahh that was it, yes it was clippy.js!
It was a desktop app though (with a C++ & Python API) that we had built a lot of integrations around, so there were a lot of Qt schenanigans going on, and I think he had attempted to get it to actually try and search some internal DB too for witty remarks.
It was a desktop app though (with a C++ & Python API) that we had built a lot of integrations around, so there were a lot of Qt schenanigans going on, and I think he had attempted to get it to actually try and search some internal DB too for witty remarks.
Yep, adding to a non-web app is definitely harder!
> when it's gone it's gone
Check out AI Horde, it can do text gen for free. You'd probably be wanting to do occasional generations for everything in advance, though, as it's definitely not fast enough to do this in realtime.
Check out AI Horde, it can do text gen for free. You'd probably be wanting to do occasional generations for everything in advance, though, as it's definitely not fast enough to do this in realtime.
Really cool! chatellite.space
I work at a well known German company and I am employed a little less than half time as a working student to singlehandedly plan, manage and implement a project that is shown every now and then at technology conferences and demonstrations as one of two demonstrations.
I am not able to decide anything on my own, since almost everything has to go through some superior to be bought/allowed.
Despite this PR Desaster waiting to happen, no one else in the team gives any serious time to this project, but whenever the deadline of conference X comes around, I am the one being pressured to get things done.
There are red flags on the project all around and I know it is not going to work since there has never even been a clear project vision from the start, and every month or so my direct supervisor comes along with a new turn, a new feature to be implemented despite it not working at all with whatever has been there before let alone as a complete concept. I have to actively un-implement certain features to make the next new thing work.
Thank god I have a limited contract and I am out of there at the end of the month.
It's never useless. You'll not be dumber afterwards. See as additional skill and it looks good on your resume "did that, got this"
It's all a matter of selling it with perspective :)
It's all a matter of selling it with perspective :)
Woof AlertTM converts dog barks to email. https://github.com/FoxDotBuild/woof-alert
Nice. How does it send the mail? Do you need a local mailserver running?
I wrote this like five years ago so memory is fuzzy, but if I remember correctly I was using PHP send mail and every time Barry would bark it would do an HTTP post to a PHP endpoint.
This is mission critical.
All servers are running on a K8S cluster in AWS. My monthly hosting bill is only about $1200 a month. Well worth it.
Web scale!
About 10 years ago I worked under a video game project that was ongoing for 2-3 years before I joined. It is still in progress as far as I know. So more than a decade of development if you add the time I worked there
It is a very successful gaming company and released a couple games that sold very well. But the game project I was working on was basically a side-gig that no one (other than the owner of the company) cares about. It was like it was his hobby project and he was paying us to develop it. I think it was a good game and could have been successful but it was horribly mismanaged
It is a very successful gaming company and released a couple games that sold very well. But the game project I was working on was basically a side-gig that no one (other than the owner of the company) cares about. It was like it was his hobby project and he was paying us to develop it. I think it was a good game and could have been successful but it was horribly mismanaged
In the mid-2000's I worked for a mid-sized utility company, and I know there's many folks out there who have systems that are held together with scotch-tape and bits of twine, but this was the worst data warehouse and BI reporting system I'd ever experienced. So the CEO decides, after reading an ad in an in-flight magazine, that we need to upgrade to some enterprise-grade system. Cue a tender process, and a well-known enterprise software vendor comes out on top and gets six months to design and plug in the system.
What I didn't know at the time, and came only to realize much later, is that these enterprise software vendors and integrators tend to put their A-team onto winning new business, holding back some hapless goons for the actual implementation if and when that comes around.
I was managing a team of BI analysts, data scientists and assorted "KPI reporting" heads. First thing the implementation team does is look for a list of all current reports and their data sources. OK, nothing odd there, but roll forward about four months and there's a weekly status update meeting where the vendor casually mentions that the data warehouse will be locked down to producing exact facsimiles of the current reporting, with no other access allowed for running other queries. Future reports or changes would have to be routed through the vendor for development.
This of course kicked off a major sh!tshow, where I had to go to the CEO and tell him that unless he wanted to be signing cheques to the vendor forever more, we'd better get some appropriate permissions on the data warehouse and BI reporting system.
After lots of difficult shouty meetings with the vendor, despite their threats to hold back support from their own work, we got access and could continue to do some work. However, the vendor argued that they'd need to place a couple of "senior support engineers" on staff to ensure smooth operations from our meddling. These guys turned out to be some fresh college graduates who didn't have English as a first language, but ended up costing the company about 150k/year each for them to sit at a desk and play minesweeper all day.
Lots of hard lessons learned, I was way too naive thinking that vendors just want to sell stuff, plus occasional support - rather than take over an entire function for cash.
What I didn't know at the time, and came only to realize much later, is that these enterprise software vendors and integrators tend to put their A-team onto winning new business, holding back some hapless goons for the actual implementation if and when that comes around.
I was managing a team of BI analysts, data scientists and assorted "KPI reporting" heads. First thing the implementation team does is look for a list of all current reports and their data sources. OK, nothing odd there, but roll forward about four months and there's a weekly status update meeting where the vendor casually mentions that the data warehouse will be locked down to producing exact facsimiles of the current reporting, with no other access allowed for running other queries. Future reports or changes would have to be routed through the vendor for development.
This of course kicked off a major sh!tshow, where I had to go to the CEO and tell him that unless he wanted to be signing cheques to the vendor forever more, we'd better get some appropriate permissions on the data warehouse and BI reporting system.
After lots of difficult shouty meetings with the vendor, despite their threats to hold back support from their own work, we got access and could continue to do some work. However, the vendor argued that they'd need to place a couple of "senior support engineers" on staff to ensure smooth operations from our meddling. These guys turned out to be some fresh college graduates who didn't have English as a first language, but ended up costing the company about 150k/year each for them to sit at a desk and play minesweeper all day.
Lots of hard lessons learned, I was way too naive thinking that vendors just want to sell stuff, plus occasional support - rather than take over an entire function for cash.
I don't think your work is entirely useless here, under the assumption that the tool is deprecated but nobody has discontinued using it yet. Even deprecated tools need some maintenance from time to time, and in a big organization there's lots of legacy stuff that's kept around for a long time because replacing it is a lower priority than other roadmap items.
For a useless/meaningless project I did once, I wrote the read and announce portions of a userspace BLE stack against the BlueZ sockets in Linux because it was quicker and easier than figuring out how to use the DBus interface. It also turned out to be about 10 times faster latency wise. We needed it to do a proof of concept for something which later didn't pan out in the market. The code still lives in our repository and gets compiled into our products but nobody plugs the Bluetooth dongle that triggers its activation into any fielded product.
For a useless/meaningless project I did once, I wrote the read and announce portions of a userspace BLE stack against the BlueZ sockets in Linux because it was quicker and easier than figuring out how to use the DBus interface. It also turned out to be about 10 times faster latency wise. We needed it to do a proof of concept for something which later didn't pan out in the market. The code still lives in our repository and gets compiled into our products but nobody plugs the Bluetooth dongle that triggers its activation into any fielded product.
I along with tens of other consultants were flown from around the US to the bay area and back once a week and put up in a hotel and given a rental car - to work on a project for 3 months. It turns out, the project was canceled before my first day, the leadership just didn't tell anyone because they feared backlash from users that were promised the new features.
The project itself was a mess. There were GUID-named Visual Studio solutions for every combination of values of three variables; hundreds of solutions that grew every month. The output of these projects was a spreadsheet that was then manually compared to the previous months' output.
This was all lead and managed by one of the top consulting firms in the US.
The project itself was a mess. There were GUID-named Visual Studio solutions for every combination of values of three variables; hundreds of solutions that grew every month. The output of these projects was a spreadsheet that was then manually compared to the previous months' output.
This was all lead and managed by one of the top consulting firms in the US.
I’m a programmer. All my work is ultimately, at best, useless.
That’s one of the most important lessons any good programmer learns at some point. We aren’t building monuments in software, everything we do is disposable and will eventually be someone else’s curse in the future.
That’s one of the most important lessons any good programmer learns at some point. We aren’t building monuments in software, everything we do is disposable and will eventually be someone else’s curse in the future.
Our work products are disposable, but there's still a difference in what our projects do over the course of their life. They could be a net positive, neutral, or harmful to society, or they might just be dead on arrival and never see the light of day after months of work.
All software is DOA, its replacement just hasn’t been built yet.
I got frustrated with ChatGPT for hallucinating sometimes, and my friend said "could be worse, could hallucinate all the time." And I thought it'd be fun to make that, and then we came up with a few more, and now we have this: https://cap-gpt.onrender.com/
Still pretty early in my career, but this is probably the most pointless thing I worked on. The company I work at, we do statement generation, our clients have clients that they bill monthly. The statement system on a set day of the month generates the statements and applies any charges with their customers not paying their bill on time. First part, the system itself did not allow customization on which day. All of our clients who use it, it is always done on the last day of the month. First part as to why what I later wrote was useless, it should have been built for our clients to customize the day in the first place. So, we had a client ask to be able to run statements on separate date. My original plan was to allow for date selection, obvious? The owner of the company I work for didn't like that, instead he wanted a button that our client would have go and remember to press on every month on their selected day of the month. Also, some more background, client was saying this feature was required and they were gonna leave us if we didn't do it. So I did it, and I did it the way the owner of the company I work at wanted. The day after I check in the code, the client who was claiming they were gonna leave if we didn't do it, left anyways. So I implemented a whole feature that never even got used by the person it was built for, they never even saw it, and in probably the most useless way.
I was working on a mobile team, the order came down from on-high that google recaptcha was no longer cutting it for verification during user signup and we were switching to Arkose for our captchas, for some reason, no one could tell me why other than "my boss's boss says so".
The Google and Arkose SDKs were fairly different in their implementation and the Arkose SDK needed a lot more tweaks to get working in our code. The entire company spent around a month migrating web, iOS, and Android and then coordinating a simultaneous release. All went well, congratulations all around.
Fast forward to a year later, new order from on-high: we're switching from Arkose to Google Recaptcha because Arkose was too expensive! Rumors were circulating around then that the only reason we had switched to Arkose was that some VC had a buddy on the Arkose board and pushed really hard to get our company signed on, and then immediately left.
I left the company not too long after the migration back to google Recaptcha, but was waiting with baited breath for another order to be given to switch back to Arkose.
The Google and Arkose SDKs were fairly different in their implementation and the Arkose SDK needed a lot more tweaks to get working in our code. The entire company spent around a month migrating web, iOS, and Android and then coordinating a simultaneous release. All went well, congratulations all around.
Fast forward to a year later, new order from on-high: we're switching from Arkose to Google Recaptcha because Arkose was too expensive! Rumors were circulating around then that the only reason we had switched to Arkose was that some VC had a buddy on the Arkose board and pushed really hard to get our company signed on, and then immediately left.
I left the company not too long after the migration back to google Recaptcha, but was waiting with baited breath for another order to be given to switch back to Arkose.
They're adding value and they're proud of it!
Don't stress about it. This is how this industry works. If your work isn't immediately useless, it will be soon enough when it is abandoned in favor of the next programming language or framework that is the new hotness.
Or, a new manager or exec somewhere up the chain decides to change a business process while you're still working on implementing support for the previous process. It happens all the time.
I would guess that 90% of the code I've ever written isn't used at all today, if it ever was. And that's being generous.
Or, a new manager or exec somewhere up the chain decides to change a business process while you're still working on implementing support for the previous process. It happens all the time.
I would guess that 90% of the code I've ever written isn't used at all today, if it ever was. And that's being generous.
I'm dead serious here, but if you are working on something useless do anything in your power to change that. Never work on something that's for sure going to be useless. Sometimes things become useless later, or don't pan out, and that's fine. But you're dead in the water if you aren't in a position to avoid working on something you know is useless. In fact you really shouldn't be working on something that isn't the MOST useful thing you could be doing.
I’m curious what you’ve found helps you achieve that?
Spent the last 1-2 years building a survey tool for a campus in-house using a CMS. Did so using CI pipelines which aren't trendy at my campus.
2 quarters (4 months) from release campus decides to buy an Internet SaaS product. And the in-house project was shelved completely never to be touched now.
Imma really the integration lead for the campus with the SaaS vendor. But it turns out the SaaS product cannot create the Reports we want, nor is it granular enough in other aspects for our needs compared to our in-house legacy offering.
Se la vi.
2 quarters (4 months) from release campus decides to buy an Internet SaaS product. And the in-house project was shelved completely never to be touched now.
Imma really the integration lead for the campus with the SaaS vendor. But it turns out the SaaS product cannot create the Reports we want, nor is it granular enough in other aspects for our needs compared to our in-house legacy offering.
Se la vi.
The government uses a medical coding system from a certain company. Not many others use this system however, and the government wanted the system to become more popular so they gave my company a 5 million dollar contract to add some features to enable collaboration and start building a community around the system.
We implemented the contract faithfully, and checked all the boxes, but nobody outside the government wanted to use the system.
We had a namespace of sorts we would allocate to the users in the community. There were a few times we wanted to make backward incompatible changes, which we were hesitant to do for good reason, but then I would go and check which parts of the namespace we had allocated and see that literally nobody had used the system yet, so we went ahead and made the backwards incompatible changes.
I left part way though the project. I don't know if they ever got any real users, but they did get the government's money, and, in fairness, did an honest job following the contract, so I can't blame the company.
It was one of my first jobs and it bothered me a lot how weird things were following a contract rather than doing what actual users wanted. At the time I imagined how great things would be having real users I could deliver value to, but have since learned users aren't always as wonderful as I imagined.
We implemented the contract faithfully, and checked all the boxes, but nobody outside the government wanted to use the system.
We had a namespace of sorts we would allocate to the users in the community. There were a few times we wanted to make backward incompatible changes, which we were hesitant to do for good reason, but then I would go and check which parts of the namespace we had allocated and see that literally nobody had used the system yet, so we went ahead and made the backwards incompatible changes.
I left part way though the project. I don't know if they ever got any real users, but they did get the government's money, and, in fairness, did an honest job following the contract, so I can't blame the company.
It was one of my first jobs and it bothered me a lot how weird things were following a contract rather than doing what actual users wanted. At the time I imagined how great things would be having real users I could deliver value to, but have since learned users aren't always as wonderful as I imagined.
Once upon a time I did a project for a city IT department.
They were in the process of moving from paper to digital forms. This meant for each field in a form updating about eight different data objects across three data abstractions. Imagine a form with thirty fields.
Now this is tedious and prone to error, but it gets worse
The form I was working on was not well thought out, but we had to build it anyway. So on the first demo to the functional designers, or 'stakeholders', we pointed out several oversights, which we were asked to correct. And ofcourse process some other changes they found themselves. This is half the fields in the form, so we already did a lot of useless work. But it gets worse.
The form in question was about the city being able to judge if somebody would be entitled to benefits. Citizens with benefits would be asked to volunarily fill in this form, and judged if they could keep their benefits. Yes, voluntarily. Would you fill in a form, which could make you lose monthly income? Or not fill it in, and keep your benefits?
Pointing this out had no effect. For me, the form was useless, and so was the technical implementation.
I left that month.
They were in the process of moving from paper to digital forms. This meant for each field in a form updating about eight different data objects across three data abstractions. Imagine a form with thirty fields.
Now this is tedious and prone to error, but it gets worse
The form I was working on was not well thought out, but we had to build it anyway. So on the first demo to the functional designers, or 'stakeholders', we pointed out several oversights, which we were asked to correct. And ofcourse process some other changes they found themselves. This is half the fields in the form, so we already did a lot of useless work. But it gets worse.
The form in question was about the city being able to judge if somebody would be entitled to benefits. Citizens with benefits would be asked to volunarily fill in this form, and judged if they could keep their benefits. Yes, voluntarily. Would you fill in a form, which could make you lose monthly income? Or not fill it in, and keep your benefits?
Pointing this out had no effect. For me, the form was useless, and so was the technical implementation.
I left that month.
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.
In a previous career as a hardware engineer, I spent two and a half years leading three different projects that ended up being cancelled because marketing realized that they couldn't sell them. These were line cards for an early (2002) racked IP-based DSLAM.
Memory is hazy, and I may get some of this wrong because I left the industry a while back.
One was a multi-port T1/E1 interface card that provided -48V line power to downstream repeaters or CPE. Think PoE but over T1/E1 interfaces at telco voltages and ruggedized to sit in an outdoor metal cabinet with no fans. All components were rated -40C to +85C. I am glad it was cancelled. It was going to be a safety and regulatory certification nightmare.
Another was a multi-port DS3 interface card that did circuit emulation over Ethernet. There were no off-the-shelf ICs that could do everything they wanted. So, we ended up with 4 very expensive FPGAs on the board. This one went into second prototype stage before being cancelled. I'd guess, $200k spent just on prototype hardware.
I can't remember the third project. At that stage I was jokingly known as some sort of project killer.
Memory is hazy, and I may get some of this wrong because I left the industry a while back.
One was a multi-port T1/E1 interface card that provided -48V line power to downstream repeaters or CPE. Think PoE but over T1/E1 interfaces at telco voltages and ruggedized to sit in an outdoor metal cabinet with no fans. All components were rated -40C to +85C. I am glad it was cancelled. It was going to be a safety and regulatory certification nightmare.
Another was a multi-port DS3 interface card that did circuit emulation over Ethernet. There were no off-the-shelf ICs that could do everything they wanted. So, we ended up with 4 very expensive FPGAs on the board. This one went into second prototype stage before being cancelled. I'd guess, $200k spent just on prototype hardware.
I can't remember the third project. At that stage I was jokingly known as some sort of project killer.
i imagine 200k was peanuts compared to the cost of design and implementation. People are expensive!
The CIO demanded that we deploy Confluence for some special project. It had to be implemented with our external identity system for reasons.
It was flagged as a “CIO Priority”, so exempt from normal lifecycle activities and rules.
I did this work in 2009. I got a call a few weeks ago about it because it wouldn’t restart. Turns out in 15 years it was migrated a dozen times, and most recently migrated to GCP.
It was flagged as a “CIO Priority”, so exempt from normal lifecycle activities and rules.
I did this work in 2009. I got a call a few weeks ago about it because it wouldn’t restart. Turns out in 15 years it was migrated a dozen times, and most recently migrated to GCP.
I made a browser extension that allows scripting short webpage interaction scenarios[0] using a custom DSL. The DSL allows to point to elements using on-screen labels, similarly to trydactil, pentadactyl and such. The DSL actions are essentially functions that accept arguments, for example one can describe something like "enter 'foo' in google search field and press the button" with a script line similar to: "|'foo'a c", where 'a' and 'c' correspond to labels on the screen.
These scenario descriptions can then be bound to hotkeys.
I decided to embed a LISP into the extension, but while building the interpreter[1] I realized that the DSL is already too complex for everyday use, and I haven't really used it to automate anything.
I am the only user of this addon.
[0] https://github.com/axes-webext/axes [1] https://gitlab.com/kiniro/
These scenario descriptions can then be bound to hotkeys.
I decided to embed a LISP into the extension, but while building the interpreter[1] I realized that the DSL is already too complex for everyday use, and I haven't really used it to automate anything.
I am the only user of this addon.
[0] https://github.com/axes-webext/axes [1] https://gitlab.com/kiniro/
One of Parkinson's essays (of Parkinson's Law fame) is full of stories of things that are "perfected" only after they stop being used.
Although ancient, his essays are still useful in today's world...
https://archive.org/details/parkinsonslawoth0000park_f7z9
Short, funny, and inciteful
Although ancient, his essays are still useful in today's world...
https://archive.org/details/parkinsonslawoth0000park_f7z9
Short, funny, and inciteful
The Parkinson's Law aphorism departs a bit from his original point though both are totally valid. It's pretty amazing how applicable so many of his essays still are. They mostly don't seem dated at all. See bikeshedding.
I worked on a data management system that basically was a very bad very slow filesystem implementation... That lived on a filesystem.
It literally did nothing other than store files on disk and let you access them.. Very slowly. It didn't support subdirectories, so you needed to drop everything into one directory... And an LS on 500 files took about 4 minutes.
Everyone at the company hated it, but it was the baby of the VP in charge of engineering, so it stayed.
To be clear, it added nothing over just dropping files in a directory.
It literally did nothing other than store files on disk and let you access them.. Very slowly. It didn't support subdirectories, so you needed to drop everything into one directory... And an LS on 500 files took about 4 minutes.
Everyone at the company hated it, but it was the baby of the VP in charge of engineering, so it stayed.
To be clear, it added nothing over just dropping files in a directory.
We were building SD WAN. There was a brilliant evangelist spinning the story of how we were going to change the world with our new in house product. He listed off the features it would have, and I asked if our customers requested those features. He blew right by my question without even acknowledging me. There was a feeling in the room like I was being obtuse and asking silly questions. The implication was that the smart people in the room all understood why this was going to be big, and I had better keep my mouth shut and try to keep up.
To make sure the project was successful, we contracted the actual work out to BigCorp. I pointed out they were already selling a product in this space - we would be hiring them to build their own competition. No one seemed too worried.
Lots of money, lots of time, lots of progress reports, lots of calls with enthusiastic sales people. Nothing ever resembling a functional product came out of it. When it finally got cancelled I heaved a sigh of relief.
To make sure the project was successful, we contracted the actual work out to BigCorp. I pointed out they were already selling a product in this space - we would be hiring them to build their own competition. No one seemed too worried.
Lots of money, lots of time, lots of progress reports, lots of calls with enthusiastic sales people. Nothing ever resembling a functional product came out of it. When it finally got cancelled I heaved a sigh of relief.
I worked for nearly two years on a skunkworks project spearheading the use of ML.NET in a part of the company that was run by classically trained data scientists using classic data science tools. You can imagine the pushback. On the upside, I worked with some of the nicest people I've met.
I also briefly worked in an extension team for a company, as a part of a huge hiring wave of about 30 people at once. The team on the customer side was really cool and I was excited for the project. However, suspiciously little work was given to us, I was one of the lucky few to have something to do every day, but it all just seemed like filler. After a month, the CTO of that company gathered all of the new hires in a meeting and sheepishly declared that they've overestimated the scope of work and their budget and they're firing all the new hires with 1 month notice.
I also briefly worked in an extension team for a company, as a part of a huge hiring wave of about 30 people at once. The team on the customer side was really cool and I was excited for the project. However, suspiciously little work was given to us, I was one of the lucky few to have something to do every day, but it all just seemed like filler. After a month, the CTO of that company gathered all of the new hires in a meeting and sheepishly declared that they've overestimated the scope of work and their budget and they're firing all the new hires with 1 month notice.
I once made a microwave purely in software. It works and yet it doesn’t.
https://microwave.pointless.click/
https://microwave.pointless.click/
I once worked for a multi-national food processing automation company.
We had an internal control system based on RT_PREEMPT Linux and busybox. This system was created before buildroot and yocto became a thing. It was compatible with the company's previous control system, which ran on bare-metal 68k. I was on the team that maintained and developed this Linux based system. This all ran on hardware that was developed and manufactured in-house.
The company had also acquired many smaller companies over the years, all of which came with their own way of doing things. Most used PLC, but not always from the same vendor, some even used elaborate mechanical clockwork.
The Linux based stuff was actually pretty good for gluing all this stuff together.
At some point, a consulting company came in, and shortly after that, the management decided that the company should focus on its "core competencies". So, they hired a guy to find a replacement for all the different control systems within the company: One system to rule them all. It was to replace all the software and the hardware.
We told them, that they should rather focus on creating and documenting common interfaces; replacing everything was very clearly an impossible task. They ignored this advice, entered a contract with a single PLC company and deprecated the system that I was working on along with everything else.
A few years later, they fired that guy they hired and the CTO, but in the meantime, we all kept working on the "deprecated" systems while the replacement was "just around the corner".
Anyway, whether they were going to proceed or not didn't really matter to me. It's all about the journey, not the destination. You can keep learning whether you're doing something useful or not. You can still craft software to the best of your abilities and take pride in the art. In fact, don't think of yourself as a software engineer. Think of yourself as a software artist!
We had an internal control system based on RT_PREEMPT Linux and busybox. This system was created before buildroot and yocto became a thing. It was compatible with the company's previous control system, which ran on bare-metal 68k. I was on the team that maintained and developed this Linux based system. This all ran on hardware that was developed and manufactured in-house.
The company had also acquired many smaller companies over the years, all of which came with their own way of doing things. Most used PLC, but not always from the same vendor, some even used elaborate mechanical clockwork.
The Linux based stuff was actually pretty good for gluing all this stuff together.
At some point, a consulting company came in, and shortly after that, the management decided that the company should focus on its "core competencies". So, they hired a guy to find a replacement for all the different control systems within the company: One system to rule them all. It was to replace all the software and the hardware.
We told them, that they should rather focus on creating and documenting common interfaces; replacing everything was very clearly an impossible task. They ignored this advice, entered a contract with a single PLC company and deprecated the system that I was working on along with everything else.
A few years later, they fired that guy they hired and the CTO, but in the meantime, we all kept working on the "deprecated" systems while the replacement was "just around the corner".
Anyway, whether they were going to proceed or not didn't really matter to me. It's all about the journey, not the destination. You can keep learning whether you're doing something useful or not. You can still craft software to the best of your abilities and take pride in the art. In fact, don't think of yourself as a software engineer. Think of yourself as a software artist!
Not a project, and a second hand story that I'm sure a lot of people can recognize.
But I knew a sysadmin at a large european educational institution whose only job it was to hit up-arrow and enter a few times a day when a server crashed.
They knew how to fix this too, they just didn't care. And nobody else had enough experience to understand.
But I knew a sysadmin at a large european educational institution whose only job it was to hit up-arrow and enter a few times a day when a server crashed.
They knew how to fix this too, they just didn't care. And nobody else had enough experience to understand.
This actually really common eventually every devops guy in over their heads becomes a human deadman’s switch.
A bit like Lost (TV Series)
At one point I was working for a large international ag company helping them expand their mobile offering in other countries. We had working native apps in the US that were well tested and well received by customers. So the obvious choice was to take the steps needed to internationalize that code so it could be deployed in more regions. Instead we had to run with the fully custom implementation that the other country's team had already started building. And by started building I mean they had a few Ionic pages created that didn't even have full functionality. Everyone agreed that scrapping that project and just leveraging the existing code base was the right way to go. Yet that's not what we did. We continued to build on the much worse app for months knowing it was just going to be replaced anyway. One of the most depressing roles I've been in.
My marriage.
But for real, the first full-time programming gig I had was at a place that displayed huge tables of stock prices or something like that - I don't recall the exact data or why we were providing it, but I do remember the problem that I was assigned to solving: the tables of data were so large that on modest computers and those newfangled smartphones, system performance would drag to a crawl.
I was tasked with solving this problem, but not tasked with solving it in a particular way. This would have been around 2007, so IE 6 was the primary target, and if jQuery was out yet, it wasn't widely used yet.
After a good deal of experimentation, the solution I came up with was kind of ridiculous - the page would load the table, then remove all but the first two screen-heights of rows and replace it with a single row with a CSS height parameter set to the sum of all the other rows in the table. As the user scrolled through the table, rows of data were added below the existing rows while the footer "megarow" was shrunk, while a header "megarow" was created and set to the height of rows of data that were removed. The experience was flawless if you didn't scroll too fast or use the home/end keys, but even if you did you just saw a flash of an empty table row before the correct rows were loaded into place. It worked really well.
Anyway, that took up the bulk of my first three weeks working there before some higher-up took a look at the books and decided they needed to start laying people off in reverse order that they were fired - which I guess makes sense if you don't want to be bothered to do an evaluation of someone's skill, but still, it was pretty offputting to lose my first real dev job that way. To this day I have no idea if that code ever saw production - the product was an expensive subscription service so I had no way of checking up on it inexpensively.
Fortunately I was able to rebound and get another dev gig through a friend of my stepfather, and I've continued to hack away ever since.
But for real, the first full-time programming gig I had was at a place that displayed huge tables of stock prices or something like that - I don't recall the exact data or why we were providing it, but I do remember the problem that I was assigned to solving: the tables of data were so large that on modest computers and those newfangled smartphones, system performance would drag to a crawl.
I was tasked with solving this problem, but not tasked with solving it in a particular way. This would have been around 2007, so IE 6 was the primary target, and if jQuery was out yet, it wasn't widely used yet.
After a good deal of experimentation, the solution I came up with was kind of ridiculous - the page would load the table, then remove all but the first two screen-heights of rows and replace it with a single row with a CSS height parameter set to the sum of all the other rows in the table. As the user scrolled through the table, rows of data were added below the existing rows while the footer "megarow" was shrunk, while a header "megarow" was created and set to the height of rows of data that were removed. The experience was flawless if you didn't scroll too fast or use the home/end keys, but even if you did you just saw a flash of an empty table row before the correct rows were loaded into place. It worked really well.
Anyway, that took up the bulk of my first three weeks working there before some higher-up took a look at the books and decided they needed to start laying people off in reverse order that they were fired - which I guess makes sense if you don't want to be bothered to do an evaluation of someone's skill, but still, it was pretty offputting to lose my first real dev job that way. To this day I have no idea if that code ever saw production - the product was an expensive subscription service so I had no way of checking up on it inexpensively.
Fortunately I was able to rebound and get another dev gig through a friend of my stepfather, and I've continued to hack away ever since.
When something I work on gets cancelled or not released, I try to feel better about it by thinking of the learning involved. Sometimes when I've been on projects that are going nowhere I will try and find ways to learn new things. A very minor, but useful example was a project early in my career where we were told to stop work while the management re-evaluates the project. I learnt to touch-type that month, a useful skill for my whole career. That was my first year contracting, they gave us a months notice on that project and I started the next contract the next Monday, so I billed 13 months that year.
I feel for architects that see their own buildings torn down in their lifetimes and replaced. I'd find that hard to deal with.
I feel for architects that see their own buildings torn down in their lifetimes and replaced. I'd find that hard to deal with.
Spent months building an application that I knew would never ever be used by anyone. It was actually highly stressful as for some reason it was considered a big opportunity and I was pressured to deliver quicker. I was young and didn't know how to deal with that.
Our firm signed a contract with a makeup manufacturing company to build an e-commerce system (web/shipping/marketplaces integrated). They had no idea how to advertise or drive traffic. We built it in 4 months, then told them what needed to be done for marketing in a meeting.
Instead of following basic instructions, the CEO and CFO came together and invited every known influencer in Los Angeles to a rooftop party in Hollywood. For this event, they spent over 1 million dollars paying for the fancy hotel for a day, decorations, gifts, and unlimited alcohol. After the event, there was no money left for marketing. They shut down the site after 3 months of not trying anything else.
Instead of following basic instructions, the CEO and CFO came together and invited every known influencer in Los Angeles to a rooftop party in Hollywood. For this event, they spent over 1 million dollars paying for the fancy hotel for a day, decorations, gifts, and unlimited alcohol. After the event, there was no money left for marketing. They shut down the site after 3 months of not trying anything else.
I was churning out prototypes, tools and complete in-house solutions for years. Worked as a main tech guy in a “fast-moving” company with ideas mostly related to let’s say less lit parts of the economy and strange tech involved. Having 4-6 projects per year that “we” could bury in few weeks for non-technical reasons was a norm. Sometimes I spent weekends to create something mvp very fast “to test the idea”, which then was left dormant for another week and/or abandoned due to new findings.
This was demotivating af. I wished I could go back 10-15 years into my consulting days when I helped real people to do understandable, healthy things.
This was demotivating af. I wished I could go back 10-15 years into my consulting days when I helped real people to do understandable, healthy things.
Did an internship once where they had me dig through a massive shared drive and map it out in an attempt to trim unused bits. Doubt it was ever used.
Also wrote some Visual Basic Code that I’m 100% dead certain was never used. Which was probably for the better
Also wrote some Visual Basic Code that I’m 100% dead certain was never used. Which was probably for the better
I spent the better part of a year re-documenting a piece of medical device software that was going to be taken over by a different division of the company. We didn't build any new code, just documentation. This was originally supposed to take 3 months and was going to be done by a single contractor who was supposed to just update documents with new templates.
When we were just a month from completing this project, they laid off everyone involved in the project except for me. I don't know for sure how much this boondoggle cost, but it was at least mid-single-digit millions of USD just based on the number of folks involved.
When we were just a month from completing this project, they laid off everyone involved in the project except for me. I don't know for sure how much this boondoggle cost, but it was at least mid-single-digit millions of USD just based on the number of folks involved.
That does not sound that bad, does the new division now have great documentation for the product?
Nope! They decided they didn't want to do that kind of work any more, so it's all been thrown away.
I have so many options. Here's a top three
https://c50.fingswotidun.com/ useless but arguably art.
https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/ an ide,assembler,emulation for a fictional 8 bit computer.
https://github.com/Lerc/notanos A html/js desktop for Linux that I really should finish sometime.
These three projects have a combined user base in single digits. Mostly just me.
https://c50.fingswotidun.com/ useless but arguably art.
https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/ an ide,assembler,emulation for a fictional 8 bit computer.
https://github.com/Lerc/notanos A html/js desktop for Linux that I really should finish sometime.
These three projects have a combined user base in single digits. Mostly just me.
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 done. Got paid pretty well, met interesting people, learned a lot, did stuff I'd never have gotten a chance to do otherwise, but yeah, net-negative.
Classic warning sign of impending layoffs. Word to the wise.
My CEO launched a project to convert our data/visualization platform from Domo to Datarama to save money and improve functionality. To avoid adding more work to my team, the CEO hired a consulting firm to do the work and assigned one of the operations team to help them with discovery.
The project was doomed to failure because Datarama had all the same problems as Domo for our use case and, as the project dragged on, Datarama increased their pricing to match Domo's. Eventually the project died, but not after we paid for a year of Datarama and 8 months of contracting.
The project was doomed to failure because Datarama had all the same problems as Domo for our use case and, as the project dragged on, Datarama increased their pricing to match Domo's. Eventually the project died, but not after we paid for a year of Datarama and 8 months of contracting.
I wrote a simulator for testing different strategies to "cheese" Egyptian ratscrew (aka slaps) in Ruby. https://github.com/benngarcia/egyptian-ratscrew-ruby
I really suck at the game and my buddy had ideas for different strategies that would beat someone skilled at the game. So I made a CLI tool to simulate these strategies. I haven't played the game since learning that yes, there are strategies that beat skill given a sufficiently low burn rate.
I really suck at the game and my buddy had ideas for different strategies that would beat someone skilled at the game. So I made a CLI tool to simulate these strategies. I haven't played the game since learning that yes, there are strategies that beat skill given a sufficiently low burn rate.
Decades ago, CITS. It was a system to keep track of "Corporate Inventory In Transient". The idea was to track inventory in Trucks.
This may seem useful, but with what I know now, it was to track inventory for a reason that was border-line illegal. During Inventory time, trucks would be loaded up and they would cruse the Highways until the Inventory was over. They wanted a way to know what inventory was on a sightseeing trip.
That company went out of business over 30 years ago and no longer exists.
This may seem useful, but with what I know now, it was to track inventory for a reason that was border-line illegal. During Inventory time, trucks would be loaded up and they would cruse the Highways until the Inventory was over. They wanted a way to know what inventory was on a sightseeing trip.
That company went out of business over 30 years ago and no longer exists.
Sounds like doing inventory but with an extra step.
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.
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.
My story is a very small one compared to most peoples - a few hours of work on the side, spanning a couple of weeks - but it think it sets a pretty high bar for pointlessnes:
This was back when:
- the internet was new and exciting, rather than just part of the background of our lives
- people used video tape recorders
- "multimedia" was a field of its own, and people made a fuss about it
I got a contract to write a program in Macromedia Director (which was what ruled the multimedia roost before an upstart program called "Flash" came along) which would take a number of still pictures and emit them as a short Quicktime movie, with each picture only on screen for a couple of frames. Definitely not the hardest bit of work I've ever done.
What was it for? Someone had had the idea that the best way of getting real estate ads in front of people was to make a 15 or 20 second movie consisting of dozens of static real estate ads, which would be broadcast on TV at the end of... what? Some news or current affairs show I think. Potential homebuyers would tape this on their VCRs and the go through it frame by frame, carefully reading each ad.
As you can imagine, this was before people had much bandwidth, and long before real estate moved online.
By some miracle this actually got aired a couple of times before the idea sunk into oblivion.
This was back when:
- the internet was new and exciting, rather than just part of the background of our lives
- people used video tape recorders
- "multimedia" was a field of its own, and people made a fuss about it
I got a contract to write a program in Macromedia Director (which was what ruled the multimedia roost before an upstart program called "Flash" came along) which would take a number of still pictures and emit them as a short Quicktime movie, with each picture only on screen for a couple of frames. Definitely not the hardest bit of work I've ever done.
What was it for? Someone had had the idea that the best way of getting real estate ads in front of people was to make a 15 or 20 second movie consisting of dozens of static real estate ads, which would be broadcast on TV at the end of... what? Some news or current affairs show I think. Potential homebuyers would tape this on their VCRs and the go through it frame by frame, carefully reading each ad.
As you can imagine, this was before people had much bandwidth, and long before real estate moved online.
By some miracle this actually got aired a couple of times before the idea sunk into oblivion.
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, troublesome maintenance.
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.
Had to deploy systems to 5 new remote destinations that the airline I worked at was going to start flying to. I was given 30 days to rollout, which is tight because we were starting from scratch with no infrastructure or equipment on hand. So had to rush order everything, paying premium prices, and had to sign contracts for internet access, etc. Because these 5 airports were not currently in service, had to ship equipment and implementation teams to deploy. Now, when I said remote, I mean they are not large locations so there were no local contractors available or available at extremely high costs.
Anyway, got everything and started up. The airline started operating to 2 airports and then after a month realized that it wasn't cost efficient to operate at any of these 5 airports. The cost to just cancel and remove the equipment was USD100,000, not including the cost of setting up in the first place. Total cost blown as USD250,000. Colossal waste of time.
Anyway, got everything and started up. The airline started operating to 2 airports and then after a month realized that it wasn't cost efficient to operate at any of these 5 airports. The cost to just cancel and remove the equipment was USD100,000, not including the cost of setting up in the first place. Total cost blown as USD250,000. Colossal waste of time.
i once worked for a small startup that had licensed an autocad clone [https://www.intellicad.org/] and were customising it as a low-cost autocad alternative for the indian architect market. the platform itself had a bunch of bugs and performance issues, and i was hired to work on some of the more egregious ones (it was kind of fun, i learnt a lot doing it, but it was an ultimately futile task because we were never going to really compete with autocad. but that wasn't the useless part; i was willing to give that my best shot as long as everyone was realistic about what we could and couldn't achieve).
the useless part came about when the company was clearly going down the drain, and the ceo was desperate to find a pivot. he had a friend who was a chip engineer, and said friend had complained to him about how hard and unintuitive EDA tools were to work with. our man gets convinced that the problem is that "these EDA firms hire scientists and mathematicians, but no one who really knows about UI design, unlike CAD companies", and that if we could hook our CAD product up to some open source circuit simulation libraries we could come up with an mvp that would be clearly so much better to use that we could get funded to develop it.
now i usually take the stance of "okay, you're the product guy, tell me what to implement and i'll get it done", but this time i pushed back pretty hard over what a fool's errand this was. but he had his hardware engineer buddy talking into one ear and the "make money fast" shoulder devil talking into the other, and would not listen. so fine, i took a couple of months to play around with CAD fileformat parsers and electronic simulation libraries, got some very basic circuits working and handed over an MVP which of course went precisely nowhere.
the useless part came about when the company was clearly going down the drain, and the ceo was desperate to find a pivot. he had a friend who was a chip engineer, and said friend had complained to him about how hard and unintuitive EDA tools were to work with. our man gets convinced that the problem is that "these EDA firms hire scientists and mathematicians, but no one who really knows about UI design, unlike CAD companies", and that if we could hook our CAD product up to some open source circuit simulation libraries we could come up with an mvp that would be clearly so much better to use that we could get funded to develop it.
now i usually take the stance of "okay, you're the product guy, tell me what to implement and i'll get it done", but this time i pushed back pretty hard over what a fool's errand this was. but he had his hardware engineer buddy talking into one ear and the "make money fast" shoulder devil talking into the other, and would not listen. so fine, i took a couple of months to play around with CAD fileformat parsers and electronic simulation libraries, got some very basic circuits working and handed over an MVP which of course went precisely nowhere.
"these EDA firms hire scientists and mathematicians, but no one who really knows about UI design, unlike CAD companies" is going to sit with me for a while.
My first contractor gig was to add some functionality to a document processing script.
First time I was programming in the scripting language, but after reading the docs to grok the syntax and standard library apis and a repl to test out code snippets, I was good to go.
I open the script.
If you've ever transferred a CRLF-delimited text file to a UNIX-like OS and back, you know what I saw.
The script alternated between code and blank lines. Someone had committed the code after some tool somewhere along the way did a CRLF->LFLF->CRLFCRLF roundtrip.
And no one decided to bite the bullet and cleanup the mess.
Sigh.
After spending a couple of days to get the script running on test documents and understanding the code flow, I discovered two things:
1 - a coder had inserted a one minute sleep() call delay into the script (so the script's output could be checked?) That coder committed the change which was rolled out into production!
2 - the script had two large if statements, each several hundreds of lines long. There were a handful of differences in the two if statements - took me at least half a day to confirm that there were only a handful of trivial differences.
I removed the sleep call and refactored the two if statements into two function calls with the few variable arguments required and created one function to handle the functionality of those two large if statements.
I also removed all the extraneous blank lines.
In the end:
- reduced the script's line count by 75% (half the lines were blank, consolidated the two large if statements into one function and invoked the function 2x)
- reduced the runtime by one minute per document processed
The company didn't believe me when I mentioned the sleep() call in the script. I had to open the script on the production box and show them the sleep() call.
I committed my refactored script and got assigned to another project.
One year later, I ask how the new script was doing in production.
The people responsible for the daily monitoring of the document processing say that they're still using the old script.
Oh.
That's nice.
I hope they took out the one minute sleep() call at least.
First time I was programming in the scripting language, but after reading the docs to grok the syntax and standard library apis and a repl to test out code snippets, I was good to go.
I open the script.
If you've ever transferred a CRLF-delimited text file to a UNIX-like OS and back, you know what I saw.
The script alternated between code and blank lines. Someone had committed the code after some tool somewhere along the way did a CRLF->LFLF->CRLFCRLF roundtrip.
And no one decided to bite the bullet and cleanup the mess.
Sigh.
After spending a couple of days to get the script running on test documents and understanding the code flow, I discovered two things:
1 - a coder had inserted a one minute sleep() call delay into the script (so the script's output could be checked?) That coder committed the change which was rolled out into production!
2 - the script had two large if statements, each several hundreds of lines long. There were a handful of differences in the two if statements - took me at least half a day to confirm that there were only a handful of trivial differences.
I removed the sleep call and refactored the two if statements into two function calls with the few variable arguments required and created one function to handle the functionality of those two large if statements.
I also removed all the extraneous blank lines.
In the end:
- reduced the script's line count by 75% (half the lines were blank, consolidated the two large if statements into one function and invoked the function 2x)
- reduced the runtime by one minute per document processed
The company didn't believe me when I mentioned the sleep() call in the script. I had to open the script on the production box and show them the sleep() call.
I committed my refactored script and got assigned to another project.
One year later, I ask how the new script was doing in production.
The people responsible for the daily monitoring of the document processing say that they're still using the old script.
Oh.
That's nice.
I hope they took out the one minute sleep() call at least.
[deleted]
Worked on a video licensing project for a cable company for six months, canceled after a merger. Worked on a tool for consulting companies to track their engineers expertise, canceled after I left. Worked on a voice assistant, canceled after ChatGPT came out.
There are a lot of dead ends in software. You get over it after awhile, just keep coding.
There are a lot of dead ends in software. You get over it after awhile, just keep coding.
Most of even all of my work for a product design agency.
I’m gladly out now but it’s a hell I don’t with anyone to go through, even just for experience, it’s exhausting and at the end of the day you can’t even mention that you worked for that X project
May not be every agency but in general how design agencies work is pretty awful compared to freelancing, productized agency concept etc.
Spend hundreds of hours on our own projects also to end up semi dead, due to directors lack of time and willingness to delegate, share ownership.
For those startup projects also it’s not super valuable, they just want you to deliver something they can throw back to their investors and get another round, to eventually sell it and start over, while you as a design contractor - done most of the product thinking, brand and marketing.
Could’ve as well put our own product out like that
I’m gladly out now but it’s a hell I don’t with anyone to go through, even just for experience, it’s exhausting and at the end of the day you can’t even mention that you worked for that X project
May not be every agency but in general how design agencies work is pretty awful compared to freelancing, productized agency concept etc.
Spend hundreds of hours on our own projects also to end up semi dead, due to directors lack of time and willingness to delegate, share ownership.
For those startup projects also it’s not super valuable, they just want you to deliver something they can throw back to their investors and get another round, to eventually sell it and start over, while you as a design contractor - done most of the product thinking, brand and marketing.
Could’ve as well put our own product out like that
I always have situations like these in the back of my mind when people try to justify their salaries, their self worth, by arguing they bring value to the world and those who make less don't.
(Not saying everyone doesn't genuinely contribute to the world, but moreso a propagation of a toxic, externally-based-worth mindset.)
(Not saying everyone doesn't genuinely contribute to the world, but moreso a propagation of a toxic, externally-based-worth mindset.)
Put on a instant meeting product that was "top priority". 4 months of good work with an understaffed team, come to find out they had another team in another office doing same thing, who knew about us, but not us them... We were naively doing demos while management knew this was throwaway.
Slightly tangential is the work I did on a National digital identity platform. It enables personal information sharing from trusted sources (birth records, tax records, banks) and could simply enable true/false responses to queries such as “Are you over 18” instead of sadly spraying PI data everywhere to be lost or stolen.
We as a team worked super hard and were super proud of what the platform could do. We even won some awards. But due to politics and bureaucracy its capabilities were never used and today the service is a national joke and really only used to logon to government services. It is going to be replaced with something new and shiny.
Now, I look back and think why did I care so much and work so hard. Why was I so naive that it would be used as designed.
We as a team worked super hard and were super proud of what the platform could do. We even won some awards. But due to politics and bureaucracy its capabilities were never used and today the service is a national joke and really only used to logon to government services. It is going to be replaced with something new and shiny.
Now, I look back and think why did I care so much and work so hard. Why was I so naive that it would be used as designed.
There’s so many countries this could be: Australia, USA, UK, Italy, Estonia.. it’s almost a national pass time
Italian SPID?
A product for the NHS that never got used.
The software for an exascale EU Horizon 2020 supercomputer that never got built.
The software for an exascale EU Horizon 2020 supercomputer that never got built.
I created a tool called Together Gift It because my family was sending an insane amount of gift related group texts during the holidays. My favorite one was when someone included the gift recipient in the group text about what gift we were getting for the person.
Together Gift It solves the problem the way you’d think: with AI. Just kidding. It solves the problem by keeping everything in one place. No more group texts. There are wish lists and everything you’d want around that type of thing. There is also AI.
https://www.togethergiftit.com/
Together Gift It solves the problem the way you’d think: with AI. Just kidding. It solves the problem by keeping everything in one place. No more group texts. There are wish lists and everything you’d want around that type of thing. There is also AI.
https://www.togethergiftit.com/
Not for work but for fun.
I made a notebook that could be saved as a bookmark. So when you run the bookmark it would reopen the notebook where you left off.
The bookmark was basically a JavaScript executable that saved data to itself and printed its own contents to the screen.
A cross device Quine without a server
I made a notebook that could be saved as a bookmark. So when you run the bookmark it would reopen the notebook where you left off.
The bookmark was basically a JavaScript executable that saved data to itself and printed its own contents to the screen.
A cross device Quine without a server
Browsers don't have a bookmark API that lets you rewrite the contents of bookmarklets et al.
How did it rewrite itself?
Also, are you referring to something like a Jupyter notebook?
How did it rewrite itself?
Also, are you referring to something like a Jupyter notebook?
Here’s a link to it to try yourself :) https://github.com/con-dog/serverless-architecture
I should Have added more context. As you write in the notebook/notepad, it updates a visual link at the bottom of the note. The link says “Drag me to the bookmarks bar”. You can drag it and it re-saves the executable including its data and timestamps the bookmark.
From memory it rewrites itself because the link itself is self-hosting state and executable of the page itself. That’s the Quine part, so when you save that link you’re saving the entire notebook “engine” + the state. Was really fun to make in an evening
Nah it’s just a plain notebook/notepad, but I was also thinking of making something similar as a JavaScript scratch pad too that works in the same way, but would be an IDE + runnable snippets. Same concept, a Quine + bookmarklet that can sync between devices without a server
I should Have added more context. As you write in the notebook/notepad, it updates a visual link at the bottom of the note. The link says “Drag me to the bookmarks bar”. You can drag it and it re-saves the executable including its data and timestamps the bookmark.
From memory it rewrites itself because the link itself is self-hosting state and executable of the page itself. That’s the Quine part, so when you save that link you’re saving the entire notebook “engine” + the state. Was really fun to make in an evening
Nah it’s just a plain notebook/notepad, but I was also thinking of making something similar as a JavaScript scratch pad too that works in the same way, but would be an IDE + runnable snippets. Same concept, a Quine + bookmarklet that can sync between devices without a server
Sometimes, I wonder how many of the LOC's that I have written are executed every day.
I honestly don't know.
I honestly don't know.
Further research is needed
How much other work does your team have to do? Is it possible that things are slow, so you've been assigned to something so your TL or manager can show what you're working on instead of saying "panqueca is just sitting around doing nothing right now?"
I worked on an army funded project designing software and simulations for a robot that had been canceled. But the money was budgeted so the work had to continue otherwise I guess someone would have had to give the money back or something?
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.
You've basically summarized David Graeber's book - Bullshit Jobs[1]. Highly recommended.
[1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-Jobs/David-G...
[1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bullshit-Jobs/David-G...
Thanks for the reference. I have heard of Graeber before for his other book Dept, but haven't looked into this book before.
A document management system running on CDC mainframes. In 1991. It had a fixed schema. The officially approved extension language was Fortran. It did not have record locking.
I was doing some user interface app. Absolutely hopeless. Burning money after blowing your nose in it.
I was doing some user interface app. Absolutely hopeless. Burning money after blowing your nose in it.
The big question is: have you clearly pointed out to your team lead that the business value of you working on this project is actually negative given the opportunity cost? Or did you just accept being assigned the ticket without providing any push-back?
I used to be a part of a 40-person strong team trying to deliver a glorified contact form based on an MVP which was originally done in Ruby on Rails in three months.
Spent half a year there, after which my sub-team's component was removed from scope and the sub-team in question dissolved.
I'm still in touch with most of my squad several years after that, as we had great chemistry, but the project itself reportedly went way over time and budget(despite shrinking the staff to less than half), costing the department that was responsible for it a significant chunk of its budget.
I guess the real use of the project were all the friendships we made along the way.
Spent half a year there, after which my sub-team's component was removed from scope and the sub-team in question dissolved.
I'm still in touch with most of my squad several years after that, as we had great chemistry, but the project itself reportedly went way over time and budget(despite shrinking the staff to less than half), costing the department that was responsible for it a significant chunk of its budget.
I guess the real use of the project were all the friendships we made along the way.
Every time I'm asked to do "sales engineering" (a term I hate). What I mean is the sales people are going to demo the product to a prospect and they know there is a feature gap that this particular prospect will depend on. So exec asks us to design a build a bullshit feature that will never actually be launched, as quickly as possible. Nine times out of ten the prospect never eventuates and the effort is wasted.
I understand the need to put your best foot forward for a sales opportunity, but there's nothing I hate more than being asked to build something in the lowest-quality way possible in order to throw it away later. I hate hate hate it.
I understand the need to put your best foot forward for a sales opportunity, but there's nothing I hate more than being asked to build something in the lowest-quality way possible in order to throw it away later. I hate hate hate it.
It could have been worse. You could have been told to then merge it and support it. "It already works, almost, so why do you need extra time on it? Now for the next feature,..."
I'm learning to play chess, does that count?
Long story short: I worked on a software that would use CD-RWs to store personal data and do some computations. It required an internet connection, some storage, and could be use everywhere without installation.
I was young and naive, but when I bought my first smartphone (HTC in the 2000s), I said to myself "we’re doomed" because the whole company was being rendered useless in front of me. The whole thing could be replaced by a small Android application that I built for myself to learn that new stuff.
10 engineers worked on that for 5 years, and it was thrown in the trash while I rewrote the whole thing in a few weeks.
I was young and naive, but when I bought my first smartphone (HTC in the 2000s), I said to myself "we’re doomed" because the whole company was being rendered useless in front of me. The whole thing could be replaced by a small Android application that I built for myself to learn that new stuff.
10 engineers worked on that for 5 years, and it was thrown in the trash while I rewrote the whole thing in a few weeks.
The most useless thing I worked on was as a working student. The whole org was developing on one specific product (around 200 people) for around 4 years.
Our company did a strategic acquisition and the acquired company made the same kind of product our org was doing. Their product was already in use, so they disassembled our org overnight and moved the affected teams to different projects.
The software architect of my team was heartbroken because of this. He was fully committed and it was exactly his dream to work on such a product. The last 4 years he was working his ass off and everything went to waste. I still feel bad for him.
The software architect of my team was heartbroken because of this. He was fully committed and it was exactly his dream to work on such a product. The last 4 years he was working his ass off and everything went to waste. I still feel bad for him.
I have a hard time calling this "useless" or saying I saw "no sense in doing [it] at all". It originally actually did seem like a great idea. But ultimately all our work was for nothing, so I think it maybe does qualify as useless.
It's 2009. After spending 5 years at my first job, I got the opportunity to work for a small (15-person), new (around 6 months old) startup. I jumped at the chance. While I was grateful for my first job (the mentorship and experience turned out to be incredibly valuable), I wasn't really excited about it anymore.
The new gig was going to change higher education. No longer would students carry around several tens of pounds of textbooks. Instead they'd carry around our tablet (we planned to sell a one-screen and two-screen, foldable version). It was fairly large, and supported touch and pen input, so students could highlight and take notes directly in the textbooks. The iPad didn't exist yet, and the idea of pervasive touch screens was still new but exciting.
We all worked so hard on it: 12+ hour days, 5, 6, and sometimes 7 days a week. I would roll into the office around 10am, and on the worst days drive home at 2am, sleep for 5 or 6 hours, and start it all again. I was tech lead for the team that built the middle layers: the UI framework, graphics, and parts of the input stack.
A year passes, and the company has grown to over 200 people. The product is shaping up: there are bugs, of course, and a lot of missing features, but things are going well. We'd been getting a lot of press and had done talks and demos at tech conferences.
And then we (the rank and file) learn that the company can't get digital rights for any useful amount of textbooks ("come back in three years when we renegotiate contracts", the publishers had been telling us), something it's clear to us that the founders knew for a while, but hadn't told us. The first iPad had been released out nine months ago, and after initial skepticism, people were starting to realize how versatile and useful it could be. To top things off, despite the iPad's smaller size and lack of pen input, it cost less than what our tablet (even our one-screen version) would need to cost to just break even.
So that was it. The company laid off half the staff (mostly on the hardware side), pivoted to making iPad apps, and sold off the hardware IP for pennies on the dollar. I lasted a couple more months before I quit, disappointed and disillusioned.
In total it was about 15 months of 70+ hour work weeks, completely useless. I'm sure a lot of people have failed startup stories, but this was the only one that I (in hindsight, perhaps foolishly and naively) poured my heart and soul and time into.
It's 2009. After spending 5 years at my first job, I got the opportunity to work for a small (15-person), new (around 6 months old) startup. I jumped at the chance. While I was grateful for my first job (the mentorship and experience turned out to be incredibly valuable), I wasn't really excited about it anymore.
The new gig was going to change higher education. No longer would students carry around several tens of pounds of textbooks. Instead they'd carry around our tablet (we planned to sell a one-screen and two-screen, foldable version). It was fairly large, and supported touch and pen input, so students could highlight and take notes directly in the textbooks. The iPad didn't exist yet, and the idea of pervasive touch screens was still new but exciting.
We all worked so hard on it: 12+ hour days, 5, 6, and sometimes 7 days a week. I would roll into the office around 10am, and on the worst days drive home at 2am, sleep for 5 or 6 hours, and start it all again. I was tech lead for the team that built the middle layers: the UI framework, graphics, and parts of the input stack.
A year passes, and the company has grown to over 200 people. The product is shaping up: there are bugs, of course, and a lot of missing features, but things are going well. We'd been getting a lot of press and had done talks and demos at tech conferences.
And then we (the rank and file) learn that the company can't get digital rights for any useful amount of textbooks ("come back in three years when we renegotiate contracts", the publishers had been telling us), something it's clear to us that the founders knew for a while, but hadn't told us. The first iPad had been released out nine months ago, and after initial skepticism, people were starting to realize how versatile and useful it could be. To top things off, despite the iPad's smaller size and lack of pen input, it cost less than what our tablet (even our one-screen version) would need to cost to just break even.
So that was it. The company laid off half the staff (mostly on the hardware side), pivoted to making iPad apps, and sold off the hardware IP for pennies on the dollar. I lasted a couple more months before I quit, disappointed and disillusioned.
In total it was about 15 months of 70+ hour work weeks, completely useless. I'm sure a lot of people have failed startup stories, but this was the only one that I (in hindsight, perhaps foolishly and naively) poured my heart and soul and time into.
As long as you have been paid for that "useless" project, you should be happy about it. You learned something...plus..you can showcase that "useless" project on your profile or something to get new work.
Long term, work has to have value in aggregate, otherwise we end up toiling for nothing.
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.
I developed a small bankroll/gambling simulator in Golang.
Ended up thinking I "figured out" roulette and I'm down about 2k. This isn't a lot of money for me, but I think I'm done with gambling for a while.
Ultimately just take whatever you feel like gambling, bet it on black and leave regardless of the outcome. That'll yield you better results than any system.
I'm not open sourcing the code since I don't want someone else to lose money using it.
It was really fun to learn Golang though. I also had some fun with setting up a build pipeline for the mobile app. I guess I really spent 2k to learn Golang...
Ended up thinking I "figured out" roulette and I'm down about 2k. This isn't a lot of money for me, but I think I'm done with gambling for a while.
Ultimately just take whatever you feel like gambling, bet it on black and leave regardless of the outcome. That'll yield you better results than any system.
I'm not open sourcing the code since I don't want someone else to lose money using it.
It was really fun to learn Golang though. I also had some fun with setting up a build pipeline for the mobile app. I guess I really spent 2k to learn Golang...
Unless you're calculating your actuals vs expected variance you don't know if you're right or just unlucky.
I've known pro poker players who were down $80k and new from their hands they were just unlucky and to keep going. Eventually made more as a player than many FAANG SWEs do.
I've known pro poker players who were down $80k and new from their hands they were just unlucky and to keep going. Eventually made more as a player than many FAANG SWEs do.
Roulette is a losing game no matter how you play it. There was a time when you could increase your odds by the last few percent to take an advantage by playing old and unbalanced wheels. As you could bet based on the state of the wheel and there were greater odds of a section of the wheel hitting. Casinos are aware of this now though and have upgraded to self-leveling wheels and replace them sooner before they have a chance to wear down.
Here is an interesting read about it: https://thehustle.co/professor-who-beat-roulette
Here is an interesting read about it: https://thehustle.co/professor-who-beat-roulette
Billionair Jeffrey Yass is famous for getting his start from gambling: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/06/how-trad...
He's invested in TikTok, recently visited Mar-a-Lago, now suddenly Trump is against the TikTok ban. Getting off tanget, but the Palentir billionairs are anti-TikTok for some reason.. we'll see how the fight goes..
He's invested in TikTok, recently visited Mar-a-Lago, now suddenly Trump is against the TikTok ban. Getting off tanget, but the Palentir billionairs are anti-TikTok for some reason.. we'll see how the fight goes..
That's a really difficult question, since a cancelled/abandoned project made any usefulness zero.
I guess if you learn something at least it wasn't entirely useless, but then how do you exact;y measure uselessness?
I guess if you learn something at least it wasn't entirely useless, but then how do you exact;y measure uselessness?
Our parent company had had an amazing idea, we'd license this great relevant video content, make it available for you to put on your website, and it would show our adverts around it.
We licenced a Flash based video player, and I had to make it a) work in general and b) show video adverts before after during the content.
I spent six months learning Actionscript 3, getting the goddamn player code to build and run, (the Ant build script came with the dev's homedir baked in everywhere) came up with a way to unit test it via some monkey patching etc. etc. Files called 'blank-single-frame.flv' were created to work around concurrency bugs deep in the player, etc etc.
We released it and then I saw the "content". Pure garbage. Our content partner had scraped together a desperate collection of free videos like "Frankfurt Airport shareholder update", not the stuff like "Germany's Next Top Model" we'd been promised by the excited executive.
I'm not sure who fucked over who here, but I'm pretty sure there was a very boozy dinner and possibly some cocaine involved in forming this "partnership".
So yeah, six months making a videoplayer work to show adverts around videos no-one wanted.
Can't even justify it based on what I learned cos Flash lol.
We licenced a Flash based video player, and I had to make it a) work in general and b) show video adverts before after during the content.
I spent six months learning Actionscript 3, getting the goddamn player code to build and run, (the Ant build script came with the dev's homedir baked in everywhere) came up with a way to unit test it via some monkey patching etc. etc. Files called 'blank-single-frame.flv' were created to work around concurrency bugs deep in the player, etc etc.
We released it and then I saw the "content". Pure garbage. Our content partner had scraped together a desperate collection of free videos like "Frankfurt Airport shareholder update", not the stuff like "Germany's Next Top Model" we'd been promised by the excited executive.
I'm not sure who fucked over who here, but I'm pretty sure there was a very boozy dinner and possibly some cocaine involved in forming this "partnership".
So yeah, six months making a videoplayer work to show adverts around videos no-one wanted.
Can't even justify it based on what I learned cos Flash lol.
You just described the last 3 years of my life, but instead of one pipeline, it's about 20 (of various sizes)... also, completely rewrite the old one so it keeps working, while at the same time writing the new one, which will take over and make the old one obsolete the second it's released to production... maybe even before.
No one is actually doing any planning or looking to see if certain work is worth it. Just do all the things, do them all at once, because we can't be bothered to pause for an hour to ask if the juice is worth the squeeze.
No one is actually doing any planning or looking to see if certain work is worth it. Just do all the things, do them all at once, because we can't be bothered to pause for an hour to ask if the juice is worth the squeeze.
In data-driven product development, they use A/B experiments to determine if a new feature will improve some key metric in the long run and also will not impair other key metrics. Several teams may run tens of experiments at the same time. In mature products, 80%-90% of these experiments' outcomes are zero or negative and their code is wiped out to keep the codebase unclogged.
When I was working in such a company, I warned people in the interview that most likely 80% of the code they write will be thrown away. It is surprisingly hard to cope with.
When I was working in such a company, I warned people in the interview that most likely 80% of the code they write will be thrown away. It is surprisingly hard to cope with.
It's about the journey, not the destination.
Many times I worked on implementing fixes/performance improvements, spent many hours finding very complex solutions, implementing them, debugging them, testing, improving, etc., only for them to become obsolete immediately after release just because browsers released a new version/API that was 2x better out of the box.
It happens a lot in software development, and I got used to it. I know that everything I develop is ephemeral. It could be used for many years, only a few days or maybe never released.
Many times I worked on implementing fixes/performance improvements, spent many hours finding very complex solutions, implementing them, debugging them, testing, improving, etc., only for them to become obsolete immediately after release just because browsers released a new version/API that was 2x better out of the box.
It happens a lot in software development, and I got used to it. I know that everything I develop is ephemeral. It could be used for many years, only a few days or maybe never released.
> Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios.
Hmmm. I don't know the details here but I have seen some junior devs say "that's never going to happen" as a way of justifying fragile code. And sure, maybe that thing is never going to happen. But if you carry on like that you'll end up with 1000 things that are "never going to happen", and then you'll realise that this guy was actually right.
> So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time like it?
Maybe ask your boss instead of us...
Hmmm. I don't know the details here but I have seen some junior devs say "that's never going to happen" as a way of justifying fragile code. And sure, maybe that thing is never going to happen. But if you carry on like that you'll end up with 1000 things that are "never going to happen", and then you'll realise that this guy was actually right.
> So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time like it?
Maybe ask your boss instead of us...
At least two times in my career I've (almost solo) worked on pet projects of a CTO or similar that were assigned almost no other resources and weren't really aligned with other stakeholders.
It was usually fun while it lasted but then inevitably it would just be scrapped.
Also, one time my team hired a freelancer but in order to justify him to upper management we had to invent some extra project to implement. It turned out to be all in vain anyway, since the whole team was let go one year later.
It was usually fun while it lasted but then inevitably it would just be scrapped.
Also, one time my team hired a freelancer but in order to justify him to upper management we had to invent some extra project to implement. It turned out to be all in vain anyway, since the whole team was let go one year later.
Have recently become a Gnus convert, and inspired by a few of these libraries, I have begun to figure out implementing a Bluesky/atproto backend for it.
Not quite useless, (if it works out) it will probably be of interest to two or three other people.
1. https://gitawonk.com/dickmao/nnhackernews 2. https://gitawonk.com/dickmao/nntwitter
Not quite useless, (if it works out) it will probably be of interest to two or three other people.
1. https://gitawonk.com/dickmao/nnhackernews 2. https://gitawonk.com/dickmao/nntwitter
I worked at a government contractor and they were deploying a custom Java app on tomcat in windows. Entire team was into manual deployment and I was the DevOps engineer hired to automate. I worked for a year fighting all kinds of pushbacks and ultimately got it done. When I was leaving, the you who was going to run it, said “ansible is too complicated, we don’t need it after you leave.”
And that ladies and gentlemen, is the most useless project I’ve worked on. Hey atleast I got paid I guess.
And that ladies and gentlemen, is the most useless project I’ve worked on. Hey atleast I got paid I guess.
Immigration application for my spouse. Because our application got binned as low-risk, I don’t think they read any of the stuff we put together before taking their time to rubber stamp it.
During an internship almost ten years ago, I was working on a component of the ESA Exomars 2020 mission. After leaving the company, I occasionally checked the progress of the project. First, there was a delay for the launch of two years. Later, Russia invaded Ucraine. As ESA was cooperating with the Russian space agency, the project was stopped. It has since been rescheduled to 2028.
It was a great learning experience, but I’m still not sure whether the stuff that I worked on at that time will ever be used.
I worked for two years full-time on a consumer-facing product that was canned less than 6 months after launch.
Spending a month on a useless pipeline doesn't seem that bad to me.
Spending a month on a useless pipeline doesn't seem that bad to me.
Facebook leaderboard for AT&T back when they were dropping calls like crazy. So really early in social media days.
The more you commented or liked posts the higher on leader board. Top comments would be automatically highlight.
I kept trying to get word to people in charge that the project would fail. No one would listen.
Went live for 1 day. Every top comment, was on how horrible AT&T was.
Shut down next day. 3 months of work for nothing.
The more you commented or liked posts the higher on leader board. Top comments would be automatically highlight.
I kept trying to get word to people in charge that the project would fail. No one would listen.
Went live for 1 day. Every top comment, was on how horrible AT&T was.
Shut down next day. 3 months of work for nothing.
I was assigned to a project with a tight deadline. However, there's a challenge: a lot had occurred previously, and the client who initially ordered the software is no longer interested. Despite this, a contract has been signed, money has been exchanged, and a detailed list of features must still be delivered. Consequently, we spent two months working diligently on a project that nobody truly wanted and nobody was ever going to use.
I built this https://www.squashbyte.com/
nobody plays this except me, that too once in a blue moon.
nobody plays this except me, that too once in a blue moon.
Last year I spent way too much time wiring up a janky contraption using a raspberry Pico wireless board and couple of optocouplers, so I could simulate a button press on a USB switch used as a KVM between my work notebook and personal PCs. So I could then call the pico board via http from a button push on an Elgato streamdeck.
While it worked, it was still a bit slower than me simply pressing a button on the little wired remote that came with the USB switch.
While it worked, it was still a bit slower than me simply pressing a button on the little wired remote that came with the USB switch.
The work required to improve it now is much, much less than the work required to improve it later. Let's say it is 50x easier now.
We know that old tools get reused sometimes. Let's say it is 1/3 of the time.
It's a very good expenditure of resources to update this tool now, especially since no pipelines will blow up in real time if errors are made.
It is also possible your boss is testing you. Deciding this is a easte of your time is a good way to get fired.
We know that old tools get reused sometimes. Let's say it is 1/3 of the time.
It's a very good expenditure of resources to update this tool now, especially since no pipelines will blow up in real time if errors are made.
It is also possible your boss is testing you. Deciding this is a easte of your time is a good way to get fired.
I worked on porting an application from Java to the Adobe Air runtime with actionscript. We were mostly targeting deskto, but the eventual plan was to support flash in a web app, and have an iPad app running with air as well. At the time flash was already on its way out. The project was still in progress when I left. But flash was dead a few years later, and afaik, that project never went anywhere.
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.
[deleted]
I troubleshot, fixed, and learned a bit of a new spoken language for a project that was definitely being shut down over 6 months and the equipment destroyed.
The new project would take over once it passed acceptance testing but the bugs of the old system were a daily annoyance to everyone. All of the knowledge learned does not apply to modern tech at all. I wasn’t even directed to do it.
The new project would take over once it passed acceptance testing but the bugs of the old system were a daily annoyance to everyone. All of the knowledge learned does not apply to modern tech at all. I wasn’t even directed to do it.
As a very junior developer, I once worked on a chatbot for purchasing flight tickets. You know the ones, the annoying windows that pop up when you're trying to navigate a (hopefully) otherwise perfectly usable site, the ones that are intended to replace customer support but are fundamentally unable to, the ones that you'd never trust with a transaction worth $5, much less one worth hundreds or more.
Even if this project were a rousing success by the company's definition, it would have ended up a useless chatbot used by very few people but frustrating many more.
Instead, one day we're chatting about the project, and when talking about strategy for implementation, the product manager pushes back on working too early on integrating with the actual API calls to purchase tickets. I thought having a proof-of-concept for the actual functionality would be important, so if we ran into roadblocks we could ask other teams to provide us alternative APIs with enough notice at the beginning of the project rather than the end.
The product manager said that we couldn't afford to do that, because if we did, we'd lose.
I said "what? lose? what do you mean?"
It turns out, our team was one of 3 teams competing to make the same project. Leadership wanted to make 3 fully implemented, separate systems, and the one they liked best would go live, while the others would wither and die.
It also turns out, that our team was way behind because although we had some logic set up for handling edge cases in conversations (not great by any stretch), another team with no backend developers had a beautiful UI concept that handled only exact strings with no room for deviation on the user's part. This UI concept demoed well, of course, so they were the favorites.
It was made clear to me by the team's technical lead that nobody up the management chain (including our team's direct manager) had ever written a line of code before, or knew what the difference was between backend and frontend, or a tech demo that presents well versus a working product, and so wouldn't be able to differentiate a finished product that actually purchases tickets from one that runs entirely on the frontend and talks to nothing (until launch day, of course).
I was already on edge because I had been asked to test API integrations by using my personal credit card to purchase a real flight ticket and refund it because we didn't have test cards or even corporate cards we could use.
So I resigned within a week, and my manager was furious.
This story happened probably more recently than you're thinking.
That was the most useless project I've ever worked on.
Even if this project were a rousing success by the company's definition, it would have ended up a useless chatbot used by very few people but frustrating many more.
Instead, one day we're chatting about the project, and when talking about strategy for implementation, the product manager pushes back on working too early on integrating with the actual API calls to purchase tickets. I thought having a proof-of-concept for the actual functionality would be important, so if we ran into roadblocks we could ask other teams to provide us alternative APIs with enough notice at the beginning of the project rather than the end.
The product manager said that we couldn't afford to do that, because if we did, we'd lose.
I said "what? lose? what do you mean?"
It turns out, our team was one of 3 teams competing to make the same project. Leadership wanted to make 3 fully implemented, separate systems, and the one they liked best would go live, while the others would wither and die.
It also turns out, that our team was way behind because although we had some logic set up for handling edge cases in conversations (not great by any stretch), another team with no backend developers had a beautiful UI concept that handled only exact strings with no room for deviation on the user's part. This UI concept demoed well, of course, so they were the favorites.
It was made clear to me by the team's technical lead that nobody up the management chain (including our team's direct manager) had ever written a line of code before, or knew what the difference was between backend and frontend, or a tech demo that presents well versus a working product, and so wouldn't be able to differentiate a finished product that actually purchases tickets from one that runs entirely on the frontend and talks to nothing (until launch day, of course).
I was already on edge because I had been asked to test API integrations by using my personal credit card to purchase a real flight ticket and refund it because we didn't have test cards or even corporate cards we could use.
So I resigned within a week, and my manager was furious.
This story happened probably more recently than you're thinking.
That was the most useless project I've ever worked on.
I worked on a year long project to rebuild our payments system only to learn the company had been undergoing talks and was acquired by a different payment system competitor. Even though the pending acquisition was going on for the last 6 months of the project nobody told us to stop working on this thing that the top level people knew would never be used.
I once spent the first half of a job moving services off the private cloud into a public cloud, then the second half of my job moving the same things back to the private cloud, then my team was eliminated and i was laid off. I wasn’t even that mad because overall the team’s existence was a little silly in my opinion. Loved the guys i worked with though.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time and energy building out a retail technology exhibition space. Final spit and polish was like working through multiple weekends for 12+ hours a day. We opened like a month before covid. I don't think it accomplished anything besides stroking the CEOs ego and making for some really cool case studies.
I am writing a solution manual to this textbook, by solving EVERY DAMN exercise and writing it up in latex.
It is EXTREMELY time consuming.
The actual solution manual is already available online.
I might gain an understanding of this field, but I doubt I will ever get an interesting job because of this effort.
Unless I revise this stuff, I will forget most of it in a few years.
Why am I doing this? Idk. Vanity perhaps?
Somebody stop me....
It is EXTREMELY time consuming.
The actual solution manual is already available online.
I might gain an understanding of this field, but I doubt I will ever get an interesting job because of this effort.
Unless I revise this stuff, I will forget most of it in a few years.
Why am I doing this? Idk. Vanity perhaps?
Somebody stop me....
That reminds me of a story about a friend of mine from high school. In fourth form (age 14) he did every exercise in our maths textbook and sent the author a list of corrections to the printed answers. I don't think this was very well received by the author. That friend went on to miss 7th form year, got preferential entry into a maths degree, and had his degree by the time I finished year 1.
Just curious, do you remember the name of the book and how big it was in terms of content and exercises?
It was big. Compared to textbooks today it was probably very good. Hardcover and probably 500 pages. This was 1984, in New Zealand, but I think the textbook was British.
I tried to help my daughter with some maths a few months ago and I couldn't believe how bad her textbook was. It didn't appear to explain anything, just used exercises to show results.
I tried to help my daughter with some maths a few months ago and I couldn't believe how bad her textbook was. It didn't appear to explain anything, just used exercises to show results.
What book? I always thought that doing this with Evans PDE would be the best possible way to learn the subject, but I am not skilled or dedicated enough to do such a task.
Pattern recognition and machine learning by Christopher Bishop.
My first job was working on an open source bug tracking tool that had been overextended to hell to perform business tasks: kick off automated processes, read and write from the corporate data store, etc.
I spent years fiddling with that thing. When the layoffs came and I left, they just threw the whole thing in the trash. Completely useless work.
I spent years fiddling with that thing. When the layoffs came and I left, they just threw the whole thing in the trash. Completely useless work.
Did any of you work on DVB-H or Qualcomm MediaFLO? There are thousands of us out there.
An entire ecosystem, killed overnight by the iPhone.
An entire ecosystem, killed overnight by the iPhone.
> This makes me wonder, how many people have to work on something that they see no sense in doing at all.
> So once again, if you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.
You are far from alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_job
> So once again, if you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.
You are far from alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_job
I've done plenty of useless things in my career, and had more than my fair share of projects that ended up being shelved and never used, but, sometimes, I make useless things on purpose.
https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode
Please enjoy.
https://github.com/rbanffy/selectric-mode
Please enjoy.
TL is lining you up for PIP/termination. The other guy on the team is likely his buddy. Come review time, you will be shown as an IC that struggles to deliver, and the other guy will get all the credit.
Been there, seen that. Start looking for other teams internally ASAP.
Been there, seen that. Start looking for other teams internally ASAP.
I've been the other guy in this scenario before.. because it's a deprecated tool, this is a low risk way to demonstrate some reliability improvements, and a way for the TL to 'scratch the itch' of reducing risk. The other guy's improvements will be built into the new tool.
[deleted]
Paid by the irish government to learn fortran 77 to upgrade a mainframe era storm drain program so that it could "compete" with the simplest demo that came with a COTS windows solution - because they couldn't sole source something. There were bugs in it older than me.
Once I was working on a government funded small business grant trying to do something that was mathematically impossible (and literally the first example of intractability in textbooks of the field). The only goal was for the company to collect overhead.
(Queue Rick and Morty butter getting robot meme.)
What is my purpose?
To collect overhead.
Oh my god.
(Queue Rick and Morty butter getting robot meme.)
What is my purpose?
To collect overhead.
Oh my god.
Whenever people talk about replacing engineers with AI, I think about situations like this.
When the first fully machine automated software consultancies post their first cash flow statements, there will still be humans building features that will never be used somewhere else in the same industry.
When the first fully machine automated software consultancies post their first cash flow statements, there will still be humans building features that will never be used somewhere else in the same industry.
If it’s at all possible to get moved to work on sometthing that is not “useless” then I would push for that. Would your TL be open to it?
Not only for job satisfaction but, given the current market and the propensity for layoffs, working on something useful will give you a little more job security
Not only for job satisfaction but, given the current market and the propensity for layoffs, working on something useful will give you a little more job security
But to answer the original question: I worked on a huge, year+ refactor with zero user impact. Hated it and felt very insecure in my job during it
I'm not in tech anymore. I'm now in Industrial Rope Access, specializing in geo-stabilization.
One of the projects I've worked on involved the installation (thankfully not by my team) of a very expensive, over-engineered rock-fall catch-fence. At the top of a ridge.
One of the projects I've worked on involved the installation (thankfully not by my team) of a very expensive, over-engineered rock-fall catch-fence. At the top of a ridge.
I wrote a bespoke scheme interpreter, then a virtual machine, a bytecode serialization format and a fun standard library. All in C. Totally useless for real work, not unique in any way, but really fun and great for learning. Sometimes useless shit is the best.
I love that kind of stuff!
In college I wrote an assembler, interpreter, and simulator for an 8-bit chip, the 8048. Got a four-credit "A" :-D
Later I read the C code for a Scheme interpreter -- Scheme 9 in Empty Space -- highly recommended! I bought the book. https://t3x.org/s9book/index.html
In college I wrote an assembler, interpreter, and simulator for an 8-bit chip, the 8048. Got a four-credit "A" :-D
Later I read the C code for a Scheme interpreter -- Scheme 9 in Empty Space -- highly recommended! I bought the book. https://t3x.org/s9book/index.html
I kinda think nothing I did matters. After all we are just a small blue dot in a forest of stars.
Trying to find the coolest print-in-place 3d printed toys.
Last year I gave customized fidget cubes for christmas, they were so popular I ended up getting requests for them.
Looking for something similar, the tri-color filaments make me want to re-do everything to see how it appears differently.
Last year I gave customized fidget cubes for christmas, they were so popular I ended up getting requests for them.
Looking for something similar, the tri-color filaments make me want to re-do everything to see how it appears differently.
Once spent a year building middleware to integrate money transfers with an ATM network. As we’re going to pilot, competitor buys the ATM network. End of project, thanks for your time. I have a couple more like that.
The 3rd rewrite of the same application because someone above me in the chain decided we needed to have AppX but on PlatformY , with just slightly changed requirements such that we cannot simply copy and paste it over.
A standalone Matrix chat client for Windows 95: https://imgs.club/2d8372d72d98e4bb6e13aee05ed70ae6
My last job had me updating a legacy service in a totally different language to what i was hired for a technology that was gonna get replaced in one month - hence rendering one months effort as useless.
I worked on a tool to digitize the German land registry, only to later get notified that they already had such a tool, so my work was completely useless. Worked on that for about 8 months, at least I got a bit of payment because I did it on the job. Currently the digitization of the German land registry is done in PDF format, which is of course horrible and my taxes are right now paying for people manually copying and pasting text from PDF documents.
I was employed as a simple office clerk (I had failed to start my own startup and needed any job to get some money at the time) and was told to do the same as everyone else, copying text from the PDF, rewriting the text according to legal guidelines and pasting it into an ArcGIS-based software. Meanwhile the ArcGIS-based software I was supposed to paste into crashed every 30 minutes. So the only way I saw to actually do my job was to write a digitization tool for the PDF documents. Since I had internal access to government documents (which aren't publicly available to anyone of course) I saw it as a way to build my portfolio and put the project on my resume to find a better job afterwards (which I did). I had a good manager who allowed me sudo access (my state used Linux, yay!), so I got to work.
After about 6 months I had a full GUI tool written and digitized about 100 PDF files. The software can digitize from PDF to JSON, then ran a python.wasm VM over the digitized JSON in order to rewrite the texts according to the (constantly changing) legal guidelines. Then I also "hacked" the ArcGIS-based software with a HTTP middleman logging server and found out that it was just submitting XML requests to an endpoint, so I wrote a tool to batch upload the JSON documents directly into the database instead of having to launch ArcGIS. In the end I also wrote a management server that used libgit2 to create diffs between legal document (i.e. creating Grundbuchänderungsmitteilungen via git diff), I am very proud of this because it's cool, although the chance of ever getting official approval was almost zero (but hey I thought it was cool).
I was hoping I could somehow sell my tool and support for it to the government, since the project of land registry digitization has currently taken over 20 years[1] and it's still not finished. Apparently the problem is that some bureaucrats want to make the absolute perfect data model and only release the software once the data model is perfect (which is basically never going to happen). My approach of making an extensible JSON-based model for now to just translate the PDFs - and then adapting it for use-cases later was rejected because, well, I am not a multi-million dollar company and I sadly failed to impress the government with my skills. Long story short, after about 8 months of work I was given rights to my program (even though I wrote it on government payroll, technically) but it was rejected. Oh well, at least I got a nice academic article[2] avoided shooting my brain out from boredom copying and pasting text and also advanced my career somewhat.
In case anyone needs such a tool, it's licensed GPL3 over at https://grundbuch-test.eu/
[1] https://www.grundbuch.eu/nachrichten/
[2] https://geodaesie.info/zfv/zfv-archiv/zfv-147-jahrgang/zfv-2... (page 4)
I was employed as a simple office clerk (I had failed to start my own startup and needed any job to get some money at the time) and was told to do the same as everyone else, copying text from the PDF, rewriting the text according to legal guidelines and pasting it into an ArcGIS-based software. Meanwhile the ArcGIS-based software I was supposed to paste into crashed every 30 minutes. So the only way I saw to actually do my job was to write a digitization tool for the PDF documents. Since I had internal access to government documents (which aren't publicly available to anyone of course) I saw it as a way to build my portfolio and put the project on my resume to find a better job afterwards (which I did). I had a good manager who allowed me sudo access (my state used Linux, yay!), so I got to work.
After about 6 months I had a full GUI tool written and digitized about 100 PDF files. The software can digitize from PDF to JSON, then ran a python.wasm VM over the digitized JSON in order to rewrite the texts according to the (constantly changing) legal guidelines. Then I also "hacked" the ArcGIS-based software with a HTTP middleman logging server and found out that it was just submitting XML requests to an endpoint, so I wrote a tool to batch upload the JSON documents directly into the database instead of having to launch ArcGIS. In the end I also wrote a management server that used libgit2 to create diffs between legal document (i.e. creating Grundbuchänderungsmitteilungen via git diff), I am very proud of this because it's cool, although the chance of ever getting official approval was almost zero (but hey I thought it was cool).
I was hoping I could somehow sell my tool and support for it to the government, since the project of land registry digitization has currently taken over 20 years[1] and it's still not finished. Apparently the problem is that some bureaucrats want to make the absolute perfect data model and only release the software once the data model is perfect (which is basically never going to happen). My approach of making an extensible JSON-based model for now to just translate the PDFs - and then adapting it for use-cases later was rejected because, well, I am not a multi-million dollar company and I sadly failed to impress the government with my skills. Long story short, after about 8 months of work I was given rights to my program (even though I wrote it on government payroll, technically) but it was rejected. Oh well, at least I got a nice academic article[2] avoided shooting my brain out from boredom copying and pasting text and also advanced my career somewhat.
In case anyone needs such a tool, it's licensed GPL3 over at https://grundbuch-test.eu/
[1] https://www.grundbuch.eu/nachrichten/
[2] https://geodaesie.info/zfv/zfv-archiv/zfv-147-jahrgang/zfv-2... (page 4)
Do you guys remember that blog whe a guy describe his worst project which started utterly complicated and ended with a static web page with a phone number on it ? I Think it qualifies
I spent 1 year implementing Auth after some architect green lighted it, and 1 yr later with resources piled in, it was barely useful.
Using existing solution would’ve taken 2 month and works
Using existing solution would’ve taken 2 month and works
>my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this guy in my team
I've worked with someone like that. He didn't last long a the company.
I've worked with someone like that. He didn't last long a the company.
Apparently everything I work on because our customer success team always seems to come back immediately after something goes into production with “customers can’t use this!”.
A weather plugin for django-cms using darksky api. Finished it, less than a month later darksky was acquired by apple and said that the api will stop working soon.
Built a PII masking system that demasked PII for all users.
I once worked on adding a feature to a radar processor. After a number of months and getting it working, it was cancelled. At least the checks didn't bounce.
Was this anything like other radar projects I've heard of? Did it working have unexpected but significant national security implications with the whole thing needing to be urgently reframed or "important" people would be at risk of looking bad...
https://hootdoogs.com/ - "find food between you guys"
[deleted]
Anything you can learn from it? Anything you'd like to try, now that there's no consequences? Can you spin it for LinkedIn karma?
Once upon a time I worked at a moderately-sized (a couple hundred people) software company that was essentially run by a group of buddies who were its original founders, all in various technical roles. One of those guys had... very strong opinions about how software should be written. To sum it up, everything is done wrongly, and if it would only be done right - i.e. the way he envisioned - software would be much better.
Now the company, up until then, was writing everything in C++ (this is mid-00s, and they are doing low-level stuff to boot, so it kinda made sense). However they had trouble finding enough qualified C++ devs. This meshed with some of his ideas of using higher-level approach to parts of the product so that "idiots" (his words) could work on it, while "smart guys" could tackle the low-level issues. He managed to sell it to the rest of the group and to their funding sources, and appointed himself "chief architect".
The logical thing at that point would be to take something like say Java or .NET. But, you see, they were also designed "wrong". So, instead, we would write our own thing, that would be even higher-level, but done "right". I believe something like a quarter of the company was eventually involved in this effort, and he insisted on the rest using the bits this team produced basically as soon as something worked (even if things would break all the time), so product development also ground down nearly to a halt.
I was one of the people working on this boondoggle, although I came in at the middle of it, when it was already kinda sorta working... so long as you didn't look at it wrong. The whole thing was pretty much crutches and duck tape from the bottom up. At the bottom layer it was COM-esque framework for C++ that gave you things like garbage collection and reflection. On top of that sat the remoting layer, complete with its own protocol, proxies/stubs etc (COM, CORBA etc were all "wrong"). On top of that we had a bespoke UI framework, with declarative markup written in XML and widgets bound to data models via its own custom high-level interpreted language that was inspired by XPath adapted to object graphs. On top of all this we had a bunch of libraries similar to .NET & Java stdlibs, to do stuff like filesystem access, SQL queries, and so on - some of it wrapping existing C++ libs, but most written from scratch.
The guy insisted that once we had it all polished, productivity and quality of software produced by the company would skyrocket. In practice, the engineers working on all this were overwhelmed by the requirements, and most of us had no experience doing anything like that, so we learned as we went, with some amusing results. For example, codegen for interface definitions (also written in yet another bespoke language, because of course IDL was "wrong") was done by having a parser emit XML which would then be processed by gnarly XSLT (and, later, XQuery) stylesheets. The garbage collector used cycle detection on top of refcounting, but the former was so slow that releasing an object graph of a few thousand objects took on the order of 10s. The UI framework guys were constantly fighting with layout engine. And so on, and so forth. Amazingly, the "chief architect" managed to keep this scam running for over 2 years before people writing money checks finally paid attention to all the grumbling from the engineers and started to investigate. When they did, it all unraveled very quickly, of course. But in the meantime, a major new release of the company's main product had to be abandoned after spending those 2 years writing it on top of that messy stack - both its stability and its performance were deemed unacceptable. The whole thing was just scrapped.
From the company's perspective, it was certainly the most useless project anyone in it has ever worked on, and it cost a lot in terms of money. On top of that, the company lost quite a few great engineers who were forced to work on this thing, or to use it in product development.
Speaking for myself, though, I've learned a lot working on it. Most of it, in the end, was knowledge of the kind "why doesn't Java / .NET do it that way?", but even that can be useful, or at the very least, interesting. The money was good, too, especially for someone fresh out of college.
Now the company, up until then, was writing everything in C++ (this is mid-00s, and they are doing low-level stuff to boot, so it kinda made sense). However they had trouble finding enough qualified C++ devs. This meshed with some of his ideas of using higher-level approach to parts of the product so that "idiots" (his words) could work on it, while "smart guys" could tackle the low-level issues. He managed to sell it to the rest of the group and to their funding sources, and appointed himself "chief architect".
The logical thing at that point would be to take something like say Java or .NET. But, you see, they were also designed "wrong". So, instead, we would write our own thing, that would be even higher-level, but done "right". I believe something like a quarter of the company was eventually involved in this effort, and he insisted on the rest using the bits this team produced basically as soon as something worked (even if things would break all the time), so product development also ground down nearly to a halt.
I was one of the people working on this boondoggle, although I came in at the middle of it, when it was already kinda sorta working... so long as you didn't look at it wrong. The whole thing was pretty much crutches and duck tape from the bottom up. At the bottom layer it was COM-esque framework for C++ that gave you things like garbage collection and reflection. On top of that sat the remoting layer, complete with its own protocol, proxies/stubs etc (COM, CORBA etc were all "wrong"). On top of that we had a bespoke UI framework, with declarative markup written in XML and widgets bound to data models via its own custom high-level interpreted language that was inspired by XPath adapted to object graphs. On top of all this we had a bunch of libraries similar to .NET & Java stdlibs, to do stuff like filesystem access, SQL queries, and so on - some of it wrapping existing C++ libs, but most written from scratch.
The guy insisted that once we had it all polished, productivity and quality of software produced by the company would skyrocket. In practice, the engineers working on all this were overwhelmed by the requirements, and most of us had no experience doing anything like that, so we learned as we went, with some amusing results. For example, codegen for interface definitions (also written in yet another bespoke language, because of course IDL was "wrong") was done by having a parser emit XML which would then be processed by gnarly XSLT (and, later, XQuery) stylesheets. The garbage collector used cycle detection on top of refcounting, but the former was so slow that releasing an object graph of a few thousand objects took on the order of 10s. The UI framework guys were constantly fighting with layout engine. And so on, and so forth. Amazingly, the "chief architect" managed to keep this scam running for over 2 years before people writing money checks finally paid attention to all the grumbling from the engineers and started to investigate. When they did, it all unraveled very quickly, of course. But in the meantime, a major new release of the company's main product had to be abandoned after spending those 2 years writing it on top of that messy stack - both its stability and its performance were deemed unacceptable. The whole thing was just scrapped.
From the company's perspective, it was certainly the most useless project anyone in it has ever worked on, and it cost a lot in terms of money. On top of that, the company lost quite a few great engineers who were forced to work on this thing, or to use it in product development.
Speaking for myself, though, I've learned a lot working on it. Most of it, in the end, was knowledge of the kind "why doesn't Java / .NET do it that way?", but even that can be useful, or at the very least, interesting. The money was good, too, especially for someone fresh out of college.
I've been in the exact same scenario twice and what I've learned is that internal tools (especially in big companies) only get "deprecated" but it's hard to abandon them completely.
I've found the decision to "deprecate" tools, especially long established ones, comes along with political shenanigans and especially so when the tool is used by multiple teams with competing interests. One team usually can yell louder than all the other teams and force the new tool to be very specific to their workflow, but because other teams have different workflows the new tool won't work for them. So you're in this limbo of supporting both forever until everyone can agree to switch to the new tool or someone important enough decides to completely turn off the deprecated tool.
I've found the decision to "deprecate" tools, especially long established ones, comes along with political shenanigans and especially so when the tool is used by multiple teams with competing interests. One team usually can yell louder than all the other teams and force the new tool to be very specific to their workflow, but because other teams have different workflows the new tool won't work for them. So you're in this limbo of supporting both forever until everyone can agree to switch to the new tool or someone important enough decides to completely turn off the deprecated tool.
I’m making a super slow version of C that is totally memory safe.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gij9UQy_JEQ&feature=youtu.be
It’s so slow lmao. 200x right now. But I can run curl and ssh so that’s something.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gij9UQy_JEQ&feature=youtu.be
It’s so slow lmao. 200x right now. But I can run curl and ssh so that’s something.
I have spent sixteen years working on a note keeping app that only I use.
I even took the registration page down after GDPR out of an abundance of caution.
I use it every day and really like it, but every time I have shown it to a friend they just shrug
I even took the registration page down after GDPR out of an abundance of caution.
I use it every day and really like it, but every time I have shown it to a friend they just shrug
Yeah, that's the usual response when someone doesn't have much data to keep track of, or thinks they can "just google it" to find something again.
I have a "knowledge management" system I put together over the years, based on a subset of HTML. Because if you can't find something, you're just wasting storage space.
I have a "knowledge management" system I put together over the years, based on a subset of HTML. Because if you can't find something, you're just wasting storage space.
In 2013 I helped make an AI powered dashboard creator tool called Watson Analytics.
In 2023 I helped make an AI powered internal tool for Meta. ...
The IBM one works better still.
In 2023 I helped make an AI powered internal tool for Meta. ...
The IBM one works better still.
there was a whole thread on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37911900
I would also encourage that, to be honest. Maybe you learned something, maybe built some relations, maybe made a mental exercise and became a better person.
I would also encourage that, to be honest. Maybe you learned something, maybe built some relations, maybe made a mental exercise and became a better person.
It was a project that wasn't going to get funding in the next year and was meant to be shut down...
This is hilariously written, thank you.
I’m still under the mistaken impression that I’m useful so I can’t provide any examples.
I’m still under the mistaken impression that I’m useful so I can’t provide any examples.
You may be getting fired soon, just fyi
[deleted]
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.
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.
Well... I've been programming for something close to 25 years, created a bunch of libraries used by... I don't really know the statistics today, but at the height of popularity there were certainly hundreds of users. I can write decently in a bunch of programming languages, some very popular and some not so much. I've been a teamlead for some years, a department manager.
Today I'm a grunt in a department of a large international company. This department was previously a separate company, but was acquired two years ago. The parent company has very little interest in what our department is doing in general.
But, that's not the most useless part, of course. My boss sucks as a programmer. But, on top of being very bad, he's only worked for this one company where he's today. He has no clue how bad he is because he's never seen anything else. After tasking me with writing some code and not being able to understand it, seeing how I wouldn't use the disastrously bad practices he instituted in his department, he decided to never give me any work that requires writing any code ever again.
It's been close to two years since I've written the last bit of code that went into any of the company's repos :) I've been given tasks that require exclusively painfully boring manual testing. It's even funnier because all those things I'm allegedly testing are, sort of, tested automatically (but automation is so awful that it mostly doesn't work).
I attend every morning meeting (online) and just read the news / Reddit / HN during the meeting. The meetings consist of my boss enjoying himself talk for about an hour. Then me and the other guy tell him that we have nothing to add and wish him a pleasant day.
I haven't opened my work email for months :) The last time I did so was because HR sent some form I had to sign, and they found me in Slack to tell that they've been waiting for my signature for far too long.
To add to the pile: the product our department works on is awful in more ways than I can count. It's hard to decide which part of it is worst, but to give you an example: in one of the recent features the customer asked for, instead of implementing this feature the two developers assigned to the task produced two MS Word documents, one around 10 pages long another one closing on 90. These two documents detailed a DIY process of implementing this feature (by the customer), mostly consisting of shell commands interspersed with terse and vague descriptions. Needles to say there was never any kind of plan for how the feature should be implemented. Product management is, basically, nonexistent where I work.
And then I was asked if I can test it... :D In, like... a few days. Because the mothership company requires publishing a release a month, and that feature has to be in the next release.
----
Hope you feel better about your plight now :)
Today I'm a grunt in a department of a large international company. This department was previously a separate company, but was acquired two years ago. The parent company has very little interest in what our department is doing in general.
But, that's not the most useless part, of course. My boss sucks as a programmer. But, on top of being very bad, he's only worked for this one company where he's today. He has no clue how bad he is because he's never seen anything else. After tasking me with writing some code and not being able to understand it, seeing how I wouldn't use the disastrously bad practices he instituted in his department, he decided to never give me any work that requires writing any code ever again.
It's been close to two years since I've written the last bit of code that went into any of the company's repos :) I've been given tasks that require exclusively painfully boring manual testing. It's even funnier because all those things I'm allegedly testing are, sort of, tested automatically (but automation is so awful that it mostly doesn't work).
I attend every morning meeting (online) and just read the news / Reddit / HN during the meeting. The meetings consist of my boss enjoying himself talk for about an hour. Then me and the other guy tell him that we have nothing to add and wish him a pleasant day.
I haven't opened my work email for months :) The last time I did so was because HR sent some form I had to sign, and they found me in Slack to tell that they've been waiting for my signature for far too long.
To add to the pile: the product our department works on is awful in more ways than I can count. It's hard to decide which part of it is worst, but to give you an example: in one of the recent features the customer asked for, instead of implementing this feature the two developers assigned to the task produced two MS Word documents, one around 10 pages long another one closing on 90. These two documents detailed a DIY process of implementing this feature (by the customer), mostly consisting of shell commands interspersed with terse and vague descriptions. Needles to say there was never any kind of plan for how the feature should be implemented. Product management is, basically, nonexistent where I work.
And then I was asked if I can test it... :D In, like... a few days. Because the mothership company requires publishing a release a month, and that feature has to be in the next release.
----
Hope you feel better about your plight now :)
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.
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.
this: https://github.com/aidantomcy/fortune
pretty useless because a better version already exists
I kid you not but it was a micrcoservice that added two numbers! This micrcoservice existed because management didn't want to clobber "specific business" logic in the formula of the addition, i.e., they don't want this service to own the arithmetic of calculating the two operands. We ended up having this service calling other 2 new created services to get the 2 operands then add them up and return. That's all. I remember the internal and cross-org discussions lasted a few weeks with several staff engineers of those orgs involved. Even sometimes, VPs of the orgs would show up to listen. The discussions were mostly about whether those 2 new services should computer the 2 operands or call yet another service! We have a few document reviews, design reviews and roll out plan.
I was pretty bored to dead but it was some sort a promote project for a few people including myself. I couldn't stand it at some point and ask my skip manager to help. My skip pulled me out and said that I didn't have to spend time in this shit show. But it did hurt my promotion case for what it's worth.
I was pretty bored to dead but it was some sort a promote project for a few people including myself. I couldn't stand it at some point and ask my skip manager to help. My skip pulled me out and said that I didn't have to spend time in this shit show. But it did hurt my promotion case for what it's worth.
My PhD thesis (ETA: TBA)
I have built the largest quotation library with over a million quotes, https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/16309/satya-quotes
But yeah its so useless
But yeah its so useless
Created a frontend for a friend and he didn't use it.
All the time.
A former employer had a client who had us re-write the same project 5 times. We kept each project repo backed up, because we were able to re-use pieces when the next re-write rolled around. Eventually they scrapped the project. The client printed money and wiped their ass with it like it was nothing. A lot of stress went into it for nothing. The project itself was a horror story. Maybe someday I'll write a blog about it.
Then there's the one where someone high up wouldn't pay ten grand for a license, so he paid a senior dev to recreate the same feature set. Took this dev over a year, so over $100k+ for a amateur (by comparison) offshoot that is maybe as reliable? Instead of just buying a license for 10 grand (I am shifting the amounts on purpose, it may have been higher ;).
Then there was the project where they hired a ton of Jr devs except like four (30+ devs) and charged senior rates for all of them. They refused to hire actual seniors, questionable hiring practices all around. The front-end folks were doing hacks that give me nightmares, because they had to (proprietary front-end framework). When the app hit the app store I saw all the negative reviews for it and was not surprised.
Then there was the project I was what I call full-stack developer plus. It involved a web front-end (I worked on the back-end, and the front-end) to a daemon (I worked on this as well) and a debian package, as well as some external APIs. It also involved mDNS / Avahi. The idea was we would install this package on a OS we customized, then we would know we could run tests on this OS. I touched every major piece of that project, and was holding the weight of the other two developers because one was a junior, the other was some weird data science guy who wrote some of the worst code we ever saw.
Edit: I forgot one key piece, I also wrote shell scripts to automate installing and provisioning this OS on Virtual Box instances, which would also check the network for this VM to be online and then install my Debian package.
It also had noVNC (a web based VNC client) so we could remotely see these systems with ease.
We had this thing running like a train by the time I was at my peak with the project, and one QA guy said one thing wasn't working, and the manager said we'll stop using it until its fixed. That was the death of that project. I also kind of left the company after all the burn out of basically carrying too much weight. It was one of my worst projects I worked on because of all the weight in my shoulders, but it was also one of the most fascinating ones.
Then there are more recent examples I dare not utter since it was within the last year at my former employer (I'm looking for work HN ;).
A former employer had a client who had us re-write the same project 5 times. We kept each project repo backed up, because we were able to re-use pieces when the next re-write rolled around. Eventually they scrapped the project. The client printed money and wiped their ass with it like it was nothing. A lot of stress went into it for nothing. The project itself was a horror story. Maybe someday I'll write a blog about it.
Then there's the one where someone high up wouldn't pay ten grand for a license, so he paid a senior dev to recreate the same feature set. Took this dev over a year, so over $100k+ for a amateur (by comparison) offshoot that is maybe as reliable? Instead of just buying a license for 10 grand (I am shifting the amounts on purpose, it may have been higher ;).
Then there was the project where they hired a ton of Jr devs except like four (30+ devs) and charged senior rates for all of them. They refused to hire actual seniors, questionable hiring practices all around. The front-end folks were doing hacks that give me nightmares, because they had to (proprietary front-end framework). When the app hit the app store I saw all the negative reviews for it and was not surprised.
Then there was the project I was what I call full-stack developer plus. It involved a web front-end (I worked on the back-end, and the front-end) to a daemon (I worked on this as well) and a debian package, as well as some external APIs. It also involved mDNS / Avahi. The idea was we would install this package on a OS we customized, then we would know we could run tests on this OS. I touched every major piece of that project, and was holding the weight of the other two developers because one was a junior, the other was some weird data science guy who wrote some of the worst code we ever saw.
Edit: I forgot one key piece, I also wrote shell scripts to automate installing and provisioning this OS on Virtual Box instances, which would also check the network for this VM to be online and then install my Debian package.
It also had noVNC (a web based VNC client) so we could remotely see these systems with ease.
We had this thing running like a train by the time I was at my peak with the project, and one QA guy said one thing wasn't working, and the manager said we'll stop using it until its fixed. That was the death of that project. I also kind of left the company after all the burn out of basically carrying too much weight. It was one of my worst projects I worked on because of all the weight in my shoulders, but it was also one of the most fascinating ones.
Then there are more recent examples I dare not utter since it was within the last year at my former employer (I'm looking for work HN ;).
A few years back, I worked at a startup that got a contract with a major software company.
Our job was to implement a crypto storage system for an OSS database where each user only had access to data based on their own authentication keys. Only minimal changes to the DB allowed, so we made our own PAM module to handle the authentication and key management.
We implemented a POSIX layer that intercepted file ops and backing-stored and encrypted the blocks into S3 containers. Files/blocks that got purged would automatically pull from S3.
One month into the project the major software company decided they didn’t want it. But we still had the contract and had to fulfill it for six more months.
So yeah, six months of code in the trash. But I learned a lot of S3, AWS and wrote a toy compiler with the spare time. Since nobody cared I was able to try a lot of new solutions, test out different languages and tools. Basically experimented with everything out there.
Delivered my code on the day of the deadline. Tested, worked, archived.
Our job was to implement a crypto storage system for an OSS database where each user only had access to data based on their own authentication keys. Only minimal changes to the DB allowed, so we made our own PAM module to handle the authentication and key management.
We implemented a POSIX layer that intercepted file ops and backing-stored and encrypted the blocks into S3 containers. Files/blocks that got purged would automatically pull from S3.
One month into the project the major software company decided they didn’t want it. But we still had the contract and had to fulfill it for six more months.
So yeah, six months of code in the trash. But I learned a lot of S3, AWS and wrote a toy compiler with the spare time. Since nobody cared I was able to try a lot of new solutions, test out different languages and tools. Basically experimented with everything out there.
Delivered my code on the day of the deadline. Tested, worked, archived.
I'm working on a rebuild of an existing app. The existing app works great, but hasn't changed for like 5 years so management thinks it's "outdated". They paid a design firm to make a "modern" design, but it honestly looks worse and hasn't been thought through at all on a practical level. The old app had a tightly coupled front end and back end. The new app is using the same back end via a non-RESTful API that has a lot of non-sensical dependencies on the old front end. There are a series of other really bad decisions made in the rebuild process, and the whole project is now almost a year behind schedule. The end result is going to be buggy, slow, and far less useful than the old app. But hey, they are giving me a steady stream of billable work, and keep paying me, so who am I to question the logic of management?
Getting TheDailyWTF vibes in here...
pretty sure i'm cursed, after 7 years in the business i would say only half of what i worked on lasted more than 2 years
Pretty much everything I have ever worked on.
I present to you.... www.donaldsniffs.com
an app to purchase a car while you wait in line at Starbucks
Every project except the last one.
Real-time forum software with a Go backend and Angular frontend.
2 years wasted.
Angular went through many version upgrades.
Go was using gorm v1.
Switched to Vue 2, then Vue 3 came out.
Simply lost motivation to continue working on it, I would've had to rewrite the backend, but it had a tightly coupled change notification websocket component.
Meh.
Maybe one day I will.
But as it is, I've wasted 2 years on this.
The Vue 2 frontend would also have to be upgraded to Vue 3.
Too much. Too much...
My whole life has been like this and I haven't started a career yet. Useless projects, one after another.
I work in an industry full of "good old boy" corruption.
A couple of years ago, our sister company asked us to support them (aka do the work for them) in an ML project with a vendor. We researched several in the industry and presented our choices. They rejected all of them and selected this fairly unknown one. This vendor was chosen without seeing a demo or interviewing alleged customers.
Immediately, this vendor set off red flags, but our CEO was too chicken shit to push back. (No, I know what you're thinking. Our CEO wasn't in on it. He's too chicken shit and stupid.) I naively came into the company around this time and immediately set up discussions to explain our data and its sources. They didn't care. They just wanted the data. They threw fits when we brought up that we weren't comfortable with releasing financial and confidential data. They were up in arms about security requirements. We had to fly out to their headquarters for a demo, and they only offered to show us a canned demo. They kept blaming my company at every opportunity including to the point of switching out meeting notes and documents for signature.
The running theory is that they were out of money, and were desperate for an exit strategy. They needed us to show off to potential buyers and investors. My theory was that they were only in it to sue us and get a settlement. And of course, decision makers at the sister company were in on the scam.
Finally, our parent company finally started seeing through the scam, but we still had to cover our asses and meet certain deliverables. I created an epic that basically was sending data through Kafka to the vendor. And of course, they wanted it yesterday.
I told the team, "This is all bullshit. They [the vendor] do not have the expertise to examine the data. They're not even going to look at it. Your work is going to be thrown away when this finally gets shut down. We just need to pipe data there. I don't care how messed up and dirty it is, don't bother testing."
Sure enough, a little while later, the parent company shut down the project. I gleefully killed the pipe when word came down. The kicker was that the vendor wasn't officially notified for another month.
During this time, did they ask us why the pipe was killed? Of course not.
A couple of years ago, our sister company asked us to support them (aka do the work for them) in an ML project with a vendor. We researched several in the industry and presented our choices. They rejected all of them and selected this fairly unknown one. This vendor was chosen without seeing a demo or interviewing alleged customers.
Immediately, this vendor set off red flags, but our CEO was too chicken shit to push back. (No, I know what you're thinking. Our CEO wasn't in on it. He's too chicken shit and stupid.) I naively came into the company around this time and immediately set up discussions to explain our data and its sources. They didn't care. They just wanted the data. They threw fits when we brought up that we weren't comfortable with releasing financial and confidential data. They were up in arms about security requirements. We had to fly out to their headquarters for a demo, and they only offered to show us a canned demo. They kept blaming my company at every opportunity including to the point of switching out meeting notes and documents for signature.
The running theory is that they were out of money, and were desperate for an exit strategy. They needed us to show off to potential buyers and investors. My theory was that they were only in it to sue us and get a settlement. And of course, decision makers at the sister company were in on the scam.
Finally, our parent company finally started seeing through the scam, but we still had to cover our asses and meet certain deliverables. I created an epic that basically was sending data through Kafka to the vendor. And of course, they wanted it yesterday.
I told the team, "This is all bullshit. They [the vendor] do not have the expertise to examine the data. They're not even going to look at it. Your work is going to be thrown away when this finally gets shut down. We just need to pipe data there. I don't care how messed up and dirty it is, don't bother testing."
Sure enough, a little while later, the parent company shut down the project. I gleefully killed the pipe when word came down. The kicker was that the vendor wasn't officially notified for another month.
During this time, did they ask us why the pipe was killed? Of course not.
The ones who didn’t pay me.
literally all of my projects but i learned something out each and every1
I pretty regularly produce documents which are required by process but no longer have a consumer. I make them because I get yelled at if I dont, but the 'product' I output is basically useless - including for the original use (which has been replaced by another similar, yet different document).
I've also implemented hours of design work for a feature the customer later decided they didnt want.
Oh well, I get paid the same anyhow.
I've also implemented hours of design work for a feature the customer later decided they didnt want.
Oh well, I get paid the same anyhow.
70% of what I do at work
have formerly done gov r&d. no further elaboration needed
My university degree.
Mine are a contest
Stuff at Google X
A great book I can recommend on this very topic: Bullshit Jobs (https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...)
Them: We need this iOS app. The government of XYZ wants it.
Me (2 months later): Here it is.
Them:
Me (2 months later): Here it is.
Them:
[deleted]
I built XKCD #936 (Horse Battery Staple) — in German…
https://pferd-batterie-tacker.com
https://pferd-batterie-tacker.com
Aparavi
Early in my career I worked on a Very Important and Very Serious project. Boy was it Important. Serious too! At least, that's what everybody said. My part was translating some ancient programs written in an obsolete proprietary actuarial modelling language, into a much more modern programming language (itself still a janky ancient thing, but at least it was still within its support contract).
This translation and migration project had been going for years before I got involved. It had been going for so long that none of the original staff that commissioned it or designed it were still around. Needless to say, the people that wrote the original actuarial programs were long departed, some retired, some no longer alive.
I inherited the task of adapting a handful of programs to run in a test environment. There was absolutely no documentation, of either the code or the programming system. We had to guess and run experiments on what particular bits of syntax did. As well as creating a like-for-like replica of the original system, we also had to fix various known issues (the promise of fixing the issues was how the project got funded by the business; the simultaneous migration to the new platform was how the project got approved by the enterprise architects). There had been attempts at writing specs for what should happen - but even the actuaries who supposedly owned the outputs of these programs didn't understand them. There were furious, intractable debates about what parts should be fixed, and what parts should remain the same. One camp argued that nothing should be fixed, because then they would have to explain to the auditors/regulators why the previous calculations hadn't been right. Mass confusion reigned, staff churned, months dragged on. Nobody thought the project was a good idea any more, but the project was uncancellable because these fixes were viewed as a mandatory resolution to a longstanding risk that the execs had on their all-powerful risk register.
The project eventually got to a state where all the new programs at least ran without errors and produced some output. I had left the project by this point, but I was still in a position where I could observe the terrible consequences.
A new financial year arrived, and it was declared that This Is It. The new programs were going live, no matter what. Of course, a big switchover was too risky, so they kept the old system running in parallel, to do various live proving tests. Some people were heroes for finally getting the project over the line. Other people were immediately drafted onto a new project: a project to fix all the problems that the previous project had deferred.
History repeated itself. The new "fix" project dragged on, and on, and on. The actuaries kept running tests comparing old and new outputs. Horrifyingly expensive consultants were brought in to complete expert analysis. Some genius exec eventually concluded that since the original project had closed, the risk must have been resolved. The "fix" project slowed, staff dissipated, and eventually it was placed on a kind of indefinite hold without ever being properly closed down.
I next encountered this a few years later, when the "new" programming environment was due to be migrated to a still-newer platform. A whole lot of money was spent migrating these Very Important live programs. Of course, the ancient system was still running, and nobody was using the outputs of the new system (but nobody would categorically sign off that they would never be used). Still, they got migrated over to the new new platform, where they ran happily for several years, consuming hours of batch time and producing hundreds of gigabytes of output each month, all unused. Eventually, they were quietly (but expensively) decommissioned .
Millions of dollars spent, man-decades of time expended. Absolutely no useful result.
Last I heard, the ancient programs were still running, with all their original flaws, and since they were concerned with long-term pension plans, they will need to keep running for several decades to come, until all the policyholders are dead.
This translation and migration project had been going for years before I got involved. It had been going for so long that none of the original staff that commissioned it or designed it were still around. Needless to say, the people that wrote the original actuarial programs were long departed, some retired, some no longer alive.
I inherited the task of adapting a handful of programs to run in a test environment. There was absolutely no documentation, of either the code or the programming system. We had to guess and run experiments on what particular bits of syntax did. As well as creating a like-for-like replica of the original system, we also had to fix various known issues (the promise of fixing the issues was how the project got funded by the business; the simultaneous migration to the new platform was how the project got approved by the enterprise architects). There had been attempts at writing specs for what should happen - but even the actuaries who supposedly owned the outputs of these programs didn't understand them. There were furious, intractable debates about what parts should be fixed, and what parts should remain the same. One camp argued that nothing should be fixed, because then they would have to explain to the auditors/regulators why the previous calculations hadn't been right. Mass confusion reigned, staff churned, months dragged on. Nobody thought the project was a good idea any more, but the project was uncancellable because these fixes were viewed as a mandatory resolution to a longstanding risk that the execs had on their all-powerful risk register.
The project eventually got to a state where all the new programs at least ran without errors and produced some output. I had left the project by this point, but I was still in a position where I could observe the terrible consequences.
A new financial year arrived, and it was declared that This Is It. The new programs were going live, no matter what. Of course, a big switchover was too risky, so they kept the old system running in parallel, to do various live proving tests. Some people were heroes for finally getting the project over the line. Other people were immediately drafted onto a new project: a project to fix all the problems that the previous project had deferred.
History repeated itself. The new "fix" project dragged on, and on, and on. The actuaries kept running tests comparing old and new outputs. Horrifyingly expensive consultants were brought in to complete expert analysis. Some genius exec eventually concluded that since the original project had closed, the risk must have been resolved. The "fix" project slowed, staff dissipated, and eventually it was placed on a kind of indefinite hold without ever being properly closed down.
I next encountered this a few years later, when the "new" programming environment was due to be migrated to a still-newer platform. A whole lot of money was spent migrating these Very Important live programs. Of course, the ancient system was still running, and nobody was using the outputs of the new system (but nobody would categorically sign off that they would never be used). Still, they got migrated over to the new new platform, where they ran happily for several years, consuming hours of batch time and producing hundreds of gigabytes of output each month, all unused. Eventually, they were quietly (but expensively) decommissioned .
Millions of dollars spent, man-decades of time expended. Absolutely no useful result.
Last I heard, the ancient programs were still running, with all their original flaws, and since they were concerned with long-term pension plans, they will need to keep running for several decades to come, until all the policyholders are dead.
We got employed by a very rich and very eccentric retired businessman to help create an online exhibition for his collection of antique items. I won't mention what the items are, but think historically significant, extraordinarily rare, stupendously expensive.
We flew over to see him with a creative proposal for the site, got the go-ahead, and spent the next 6 months creating and building. We started to get content for the site, via his "team" (a student just out of college, nice guy but totally inexperienced in ...anything much).
As we got to the go-live date it became clear that things (as ever) were going to slip on the content side of things. The head guy was extremely meticulous, and the site contained a lot of video content - everything was shot at the highest quality, and there were maybe 300 videos to do, plus lots of photographs for each item, plus text content which needed to be researched as well.
We'd stressed all along (as we always, always do...) that content is almost always the first thing that causes bottlenecks in our line of work - we hit all our deadlines, but the content was just excruciatingly slow to extract. Nothing new for us, but we then went back to the client and suggested that rather than waiting for everything to be in place he roll out the site with all the content we had (about 25%) and basically go live - then iterate as more content arrived. In this particular context this makes perfect sense - as individual items were completed we could have published them, they could have done some PR about each one, nice "trickle content" to keep the SEO and social media gods happy.
But: the head guy was not of the "go live and iterate" mindset ...at all. We finished all the design and dev work, and a year went by. I emailed the "team" guy on a regular basis, pushing for the site to go live. Round about now it turned out that everyone on the staff was absolutely terrified of head guy - if he said jump, they all said how high, and absolutely no-one on the client side was prepared to push him at all.
Another 6 months went by, and next time I emailed a totally different person who knew nothing about the project answered the email. Turns out the entire team had been replaced - so we started from scratch, trained people up on content editing, kicked off project meetings again... and then nothing.
This started a cycle that basically went on for ...8 years :-/
We'd work on the thing for a bit, the team would change, we'd re-train, content would trickle in - rinse and repeat.
Obviously, all the energy and enthusiasm had gone by this time, the original design and build needed some serious refreshing anyway, and all the original project aims had sort of gone out the window in the intervening years.
After 9 years, we got dumped, and a new guy came on board to deliver the site. Luckily we had solid contractual stuff in place, so we billed our last 20% and walked away.
2 years later I noticed that the site had finally gone live - a complete rebuild, a complete new redesign. And, I have to say - with some slightly bitter pleasure - it's really terrible :-)
I have bumped into 2 more types of exactly head guy's mentality over the past 25 years working in my area - they all share the same mentality: incredibly bright self made people who have earned a wad of cash, but with that same sense of entitlement which makes them completely unable to take on board anything an external expert brings to the table. I can now spot them from a mile off: they may be extremely rich and on the face of it excellent people to do work for, but f** that, when this particular personal klaxon goes off I now just say no...
We flew over to see him with a creative proposal for the site, got the go-ahead, and spent the next 6 months creating and building. We started to get content for the site, via his "team" (a student just out of college, nice guy but totally inexperienced in ...anything much).
As we got to the go-live date it became clear that things (as ever) were going to slip on the content side of things. The head guy was extremely meticulous, and the site contained a lot of video content - everything was shot at the highest quality, and there were maybe 300 videos to do, plus lots of photographs for each item, plus text content which needed to be researched as well.
We'd stressed all along (as we always, always do...) that content is almost always the first thing that causes bottlenecks in our line of work - we hit all our deadlines, but the content was just excruciatingly slow to extract. Nothing new for us, but we then went back to the client and suggested that rather than waiting for everything to be in place he roll out the site with all the content we had (about 25%) and basically go live - then iterate as more content arrived. In this particular context this makes perfect sense - as individual items were completed we could have published them, they could have done some PR about each one, nice "trickle content" to keep the SEO and social media gods happy.
But: the head guy was not of the "go live and iterate" mindset ...at all. We finished all the design and dev work, and a year went by. I emailed the "team" guy on a regular basis, pushing for the site to go live. Round about now it turned out that everyone on the staff was absolutely terrified of head guy - if he said jump, they all said how high, and absolutely no-one on the client side was prepared to push him at all.
Another 6 months went by, and next time I emailed a totally different person who knew nothing about the project answered the email. Turns out the entire team had been replaced - so we started from scratch, trained people up on content editing, kicked off project meetings again... and then nothing.
This started a cycle that basically went on for ...8 years :-/
We'd work on the thing for a bit, the team would change, we'd re-train, content would trickle in - rinse and repeat.
Obviously, all the energy and enthusiasm had gone by this time, the original design and build needed some serious refreshing anyway, and all the original project aims had sort of gone out the window in the intervening years.
After 9 years, we got dumped, and a new guy came on board to deliver the site. Luckily we had solid contractual stuff in place, so we billed our last 20% and walked away.
2 years later I noticed that the site had finally gone live - a complete rebuild, a complete new redesign. And, I have to say - with some slightly bitter pleasure - it's really terrible :-)
I have bumped into 2 more types of exactly head guy's mentality over the past 25 years working in my area - they all share the same mentality: incredibly bright self made people who have earned a wad of cash, but with that same sense of entitlement which makes them completely unable to take on board anything an external expert brings to the table. I can now spot them from a mile off: they may be extremely rich and on the face of it excellent people to do work for, but f** that, when this particular personal klaxon goes off I now just say no...
Diablo 4
A few years back, I interviewed with a company that specialized in air filtration products for hospitals and medical facilities. The company had grown rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic and was gearing up to expand their facilities.
During my interview, I expressed skepticism in their long-term prospects -- I questioned whether the air filtration market would continue to grow in the post-COVID era... and they were very bullish about their outlook. Their argument was actually very convincing -- they were preparing to kick off development of a new product that was intended to address ongoing air filtration issues that were well known before COVID. Multiple American states were drafting legislation mandating the use of these products, so the market opportunity was immediate and growing.
After rejecting their initial offer, they raised the offer and I hesitantly accepted.
Shortly after joining, I set up a product data management system that worked really well, and the other engineers (even the grey-beard) quickly adopted it. I'm very proud of the work I did on that project, and it only took me 2 months to design and implement.
The next project ate up 2 years of my life. I was tasked with designing a medical smoke evacuator. Medical smoke evacuators had been around for almost 20 years at that point - there were numerous patents that were about to expire, so we didn't have to reinvent the wheel.
Our company founder had started his firm tinkering in a garage. He had no formal background in engineering or business management, and got lucky with the pandemic. As the company grew, he started spending ridiculous sums of money on a distributed sales and marketing team, many of whom he poached from competitors. On the engineering side, he converted multiple outside consultants into full-time employees.
Despite the incredible talent flowing into the company, our founder had no respect for the opinions of his employees. He had to have final say in all decisions, and his judgments always changed at the most inopportune time.
I built multiple functional prototypes of a benchtop smoke evacuator, each about the size of desktop computer. With some finishing touches, it could have been a hit. It worked really well.
Our founder shitcanned it, deciding that we needed to design an upright wheeled smoke evacuator instead. This ballooned the size and cost of the product - it had to be stable while supporting an articulating intake hose. Additionally, it had to have a huge touchscreen display, to show various air quality measurements (that very few customers actually needed). Lastly, it had to use a particular quiet (but somewhat underpowered) fan motor that he had already been ordered in large quantities.
At this point we only had 8 months left to develop a tradeshow-ready prototype. In the medical world, 2 years is not an uncommon development timeframe. So I worked my ass off.
Despite numerous obstacles (especially in wrangling with vendors and our electrical/software team), I managed to get a beautiful prototype ready and delivered to the tradeshow. Nestled among our older products, my product was the star of our show!
Post-tradeshow, I continued working on improving the design for production. I cranked out at least 60 drawings, got quotes from vendors, sent the quotes to our CFO for purchase approval. And waited. And waited. Weeks went by without action.
Behind the scenes, our company was starving for cashflow... the medical market was in a crunch, as hospitals had overspent during the pandemic. My interview market speculations a couple years prior had come true. Several members of our sales and marketing team were let go, along with one of my engineering coworkers. To stem the tide, our executives decided to go through another round of funding with our original investors. It was during this funding round that I found myself waiting for purchase orders to be sent.
Then we got our funding... in the worst way possible. The investing group got a majority share, and they moved immediately to push the founding CEO out (and who could blame them - the guy was a hack)! The consultants came in, hard questions got asked. And then a few days later my engineering VP told me that all NPD projects had been axed by the new CEO, including my smoke evacuator. My VP privately warned my team that we needed to start looking for... "other options".
A week later, I got laid off along with a coworker and our engineering VP. Just a couple weeks before I got married. Luckily, I got multiple interviews lined up in short order and was only unemployed for a short time.
So that was the most useless project I've ever worked on. Doomed from the start, despite my best efforts.
During my interview, I expressed skepticism in their long-term prospects -- I questioned whether the air filtration market would continue to grow in the post-COVID era... and they were very bullish about their outlook. Their argument was actually very convincing -- they were preparing to kick off development of a new product that was intended to address ongoing air filtration issues that were well known before COVID. Multiple American states were drafting legislation mandating the use of these products, so the market opportunity was immediate and growing.
After rejecting their initial offer, they raised the offer and I hesitantly accepted.
Shortly after joining, I set up a product data management system that worked really well, and the other engineers (even the grey-beard) quickly adopted it. I'm very proud of the work I did on that project, and it only took me 2 months to design and implement.
The next project ate up 2 years of my life. I was tasked with designing a medical smoke evacuator. Medical smoke evacuators had been around for almost 20 years at that point - there were numerous patents that were about to expire, so we didn't have to reinvent the wheel.
Our company founder had started his firm tinkering in a garage. He had no formal background in engineering or business management, and got lucky with the pandemic. As the company grew, he started spending ridiculous sums of money on a distributed sales and marketing team, many of whom he poached from competitors. On the engineering side, he converted multiple outside consultants into full-time employees.
Despite the incredible talent flowing into the company, our founder had no respect for the opinions of his employees. He had to have final say in all decisions, and his judgments always changed at the most inopportune time.
I built multiple functional prototypes of a benchtop smoke evacuator, each about the size of desktop computer. With some finishing touches, it could have been a hit. It worked really well.
Our founder shitcanned it, deciding that we needed to design an upright wheeled smoke evacuator instead. This ballooned the size and cost of the product - it had to be stable while supporting an articulating intake hose. Additionally, it had to have a huge touchscreen display, to show various air quality measurements (that very few customers actually needed). Lastly, it had to use a particular quiet (but somewhat underpowered) fan motor that he had already been ordered in large quantities.
At this point we only had 8 months left to develop a tradeshow-ready prototype. In the medical world, 2 years is not an uncommon development timeframe. So I worked my ass off.
Despite numerous obstacles (especially in wrangling with vendors and our electrical/software team), I managed to get a beautiful prototype ready and delivered to the tradeshow. Nestled among our older products, my product was the star of our show!
Post-tradeshow, I continued working on improving the design for production. I cranked out at least 60 drawings, got quotes from vendors, sent the quotes to our CFO for purchase approval. And waited. And waited. Weeks went by without action.
Behind the scenes, our company was starving for cashflow... the medical market was in a crunch, as hospitals had overspent during the pandemic. My interview market speculations a couple years prior had come true. Several members of our sales and marketing team were let go, along with one of my engineering coworkers. To stem the tide, our executives decided to go through another round of funding with our original investors. It was during this funding round that I found myself waiting for purchase orders to be sent.
Then we got our funding... in the worst way possible. The investing group got a majority share, and they moved immediately to push the founding CEO out (and who could blame them - the guy was a hack)! The consultants came in, hard questions got asked. And then a few days later my engineering VP told me that all NPD projects had been axed by the new CEO, including my smoke evacuator. My VP privately warned my team that we needed to start looking for... "other options".
A week later, I got laid off along with a coworker and our engineering VP. Just a couple weeks before I got married. Luckily, I got multiple interviews lined up in short order and was only unemployed for a short time.
So that was the most useless project I've ever worked on. Doomed from the start, despite my best efforts.
Pinterest
Mozilla
Regarding OP's story, deprecated is just another word for "stable".
Let me give you some context. I work in the pipeline automation department of a company. Last month, our team decided to deprecate an internal tool due to several maintenance issues. So we created a pipeline that automates the implementation of this legacy tool, in case other teams needed to use it. (WHAT???)
This month, a guy in my team found some improvement scenarios in the automation. So I was chosen to implement this changes in this legacy internal tool.
The thing is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this guy in my team. Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios.
But this same week, my TL sent notices to all the other teams informing them that this internal tool has been deprecated and they should no longer use it. So what sense does it make to have a pipeline automation that implements the use of the deprecated tool? And if it has been deprecated, why would I need to make an adjustment for the automation to be even resilient if no one should be able to use it anymore? So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time like it? (WTF???)
This makes me wonder, how many people have to work on something that they see no sense in doing at all.
So once again, if you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.