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

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.

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 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.

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.

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%

Any time you feel useless, remember that it's someone's job to install turn signals into BMWs.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Woof AlertTM converts dog barks to email. https://github.com/FoxDotBuild/woof-alert

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.

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.

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.

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 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....

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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?"

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....

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 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).

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.

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 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...

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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 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/

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Sometimes, I wonder how many of the LOC's that I have written are executed every day.

I honestly don't know.

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.

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.

The silver lining is that now you don't have to maintain it. Maintenance is hell.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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!”.

Regarding OP's story, deprecated is just another word for "stable".

"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.

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.

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 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.)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Created a frontend for a friend and he didn't use it.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm learning to play chess, does that count?

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.

have formerly done gov r&d. no further elaboration needed

A great book I can recommend on this very topic: Bullshit Jobs (https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...)

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

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 built XKCD #936 (Horse Battery Staple) — in German…

https://pferd-batterie-tacker.com

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.

I built this https://www.squashbyte.com/

nobody plays this except me, that too once in a blue moon.

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.

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.

Classic warning sign of impending layoffs. Word to the wise.

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.

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.

A standalone Matrix chat client for Windows 95: https://imgs.club/2d8372d72d98e4bb6e13aee05ed70ae6

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...)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My university degree.

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.

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.

I present to you.... www.donaldsniffs.com

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.

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 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.

Mozilla

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.

A product for the NHS that never got used.

The software for an exascale EU Horizon 2020 supercomputer that never got built.

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.

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

The ones who didn’t pay me.

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.

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.

You may be getting fired soon, just fyi

Pretty much everything I have ever worked on.

Stuff at Google X

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

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...

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/

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.

This is hilariously written, thank you.

I’m still under the mistaken impression that I’m useful so I can’t provide any examples.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I kinda think nothing I did matters. After all we are just a small blue dot in a forest of stars.

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.

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?

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 ;).

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.

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

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)

Mine are a contest

My whole life has been like this and I haven't started a career yet. Useless projects, one after another.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Them: We need this iOS app. The government of XYZ wants it.

Me (2 months later): Here it is.

Them:

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...

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

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.

It was a project that wasn't going to get funding in the next year and was meant to be shut down...

Built a PII masking system that demasked PII for all users.

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

70% of what I do at work

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

chatgpt(8). It's pretty useless.

https://brynet.ca/chatgpt/

https://hootdoogs.com/ - "find food between you guys"

Pinterest

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

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

literally all of my projects but i learned something out each and every1

Every project except the last one.

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.

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

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.

My PhD thesis (ETA: TBA)

this: https://github.com/aidantomcy/fortune pretty useless because a better version already exists

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.

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?"

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.

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.

Diablo 4

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.

I once made a microwave purely in software. It works and yet it doesn’t.

https://microwave.pointless.click/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 ...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?"

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.