Apr 08, 2024 19:00:00

In response to the question 'What is the most pointless project you have ever worked on?', engineers from all over the world shared their crappy stories about the worst experiences they had, creating a lot of excitement.

In response to a question posted on the online bulletin board site Hacker News asking 'What is the most pointless project you have ever worked on?', engineers from all over the world shared stories of the most pointless projects they have ever worked on.

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

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

'At my workplace, we implemented changes to an automation tool so that other teams could use the same tool, and then we got a notice that the tool was deprecated and

we shouldn't use it. So why did we go to the trouble of implementing the change?'

LaserDiscMan, an engineer, said, 'I was developing an ERP system in-house. At that time, I and the CTO expected that the project would go over budget and ultimately fail, but the executives kept the project going. The vendor involved in the project not only did not understand the scale of the work, but also had various shortcomings, such as omitting important features. I eventually left the company, but I always kept in touch with the CTO. According to the CTO, the project was originally scheduled to be completed in two years, but it was not completed in five years, and ultimately ended up failing at the cost of millions of dollars.'

On the other hand, Isakkeyten reported, 'At one large company where I once worked, we aimed to reduce costs by switching from an enterprise ERP solution that required hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees to a proprietary ERP solution. However, the enterprise ERP solution we were using at the time contained 90% of the company's information, so progress toward the transition was very slow. I worked on the project for two years and then left . We continued developing our own ERP solution for another two years, but eventually everyone left.'

'I've been in consulting for over 10 years, and from my experience, when migrating from one system to another, especially if the original system was home-grown, companies essentially expect the new system to work exactly like the original. This lack of flexibility tends to be the cause of more than half of the cost and time it takes to perform a migration,'

enraged_camel said.

'I worked on a six-month contract project for a major American retailer, where we were tasked with building access control lists for routers that matched existing traffic within the store,' recalls CommieBobDole.

According to CommieBobDole, the major retailer where he worked had just opened and did not have consistent IT facilities for each store. CommieBobDole initially created access control lists manually, but later built a database and wrote SQL to almost completely automate the process. However, as CommieBobDole continued his work, one day he found that he could only send a certain amount of logs to the retailer's network engineer every week.

When CommieBobDole visited the retailer's network engineer, the engineer told him a shocking fact that CommieBobDole didn't know: 'Probably the project was canceled at some point.' After that, CommieBobDole gave the engineer the SQL script and database information he had created.

Brightball also

talked about his experience of being instructed by the vice president of the company he worked for at the time to intentionally make changes to the company's internal tools in order to encourage employees to move away from old internal tools that they loved. According to Brightball, in order to intentionally reduce performance, the company introduced a function to put the internal tools to sleep at random times and to randomly display fake error messages. The vice president at the time told Brightball that he was happy to receive complaints from employees about the tools.

The project that shireboy worked on was to develop a screen called the 'EnGUAGEment Meter,' which allows employees to choose from a set of motivational messages, such as 'I'm productive' and 'I'm ready to conquer the day.' According to shireboy, the number of employees who answered the EnGUAGEment meter would increase the gauge, which looked like a car's speedometer, allowing the company's overall motivation to be visualized. The meter typically fluctuated between 30-40% every day, but on the CEO's birthday it would rise to 70-80%.

Many other engineers have also reported this to Hacker News.

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