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

760 points by panqueca ↗ HN
If you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.

Let me give you some context. I work in the pipeline automation department of a company. Last month, our team decided to deprecate an internal tool due to several maintenance issues. So we created a pipeline that automates the implementation of this legacy tool, in case other teams needed to use it. (WHAT???)

This month, a guy in my team found some improvement scenarios in the automation. So I was chosen to implement this changes in this legacy internal tool.

The thing is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this guy in my team. Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios.

But this same week, my TL sent notices to all the other teams informing them that this internal tool has been deprecated and they should no longer use it. So what sense does it make to have a pipeline automation that implements the use of the deprecated tool? And if it has been deprecated, why would I need to make an adjustment for the automation to be even resilient if no one should be able to use it anymore? So why am I being allocated to work on in such waste of time like it? (WTF???)

This makes me wonder, how many people have to work on something that they see no sense in doing at all.

So once again, if you're feeling useless, remember that I exist.

793 comments

[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] thread
theGeatZhopa
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 :)

ac2u
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.

cableshaft
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.

keepamovin
This is hilariously written, thank you.

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

resource_waste
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.

globalise83
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?
mtmail
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.

donatj
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

frfl
But that is useful. You use it everyday, that counts.
tiborsaas
100% happy user base is really something to be proud of.
Froedlich
Yeah, that's the usual response when someone doesn't have much data to keep track of, or thinks they can "just google it" to find something again.

I have a "knowledge management" system I put together over the years, based on a subset of HTML. Because if you can't find something, you're just wasting storage space.

readthenotes1
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

ghaff
The Parkinson's Law aphorism departs a bit from his original point though both are totally valid. It's pretty amazing how applicable so many of his essays still are. They mostly don't seem dated at all. See bikeshedding.
rhelz
Classic warning sign of impending layoffs. Word to the wise.
thatguyagain
I'm trying to think of a single actually useful thing I ever worked on..
gonzo41
You have worked on earning money to live in your world. Good job. Don't over think work.
ryandrake
This is the right attitude. Unless you own the business, you have no moral responsibility to ensure the projects you work on have a purpose. You can, of course, optionally choose to not work on projects you believe have a bad or evil purpose. I've quit jobs where I though the project was evil.

You're writing the code, or producing the documentation, managing the project, performing QA, or whatever else your role is, and in exchange your company is paying you money. That's the bottom line. If you think it's a useless project, then you should be even doubly grateful that a company exists that will pay you your (presumably good) salary to create something useless! I worked on a totally useless project in the past, a lot like some of the comments here describe, and I went into work every day thanking the stars that my company was stupid enough to pay me to do this!

sfpotter
Lucky for you to have the privilege to protest quit from moral outrage. Not everyone is so lucky (in fact, most people aren’t).
ragnese
Sure, but did the parent comment say otherwise? This feels like a combative reply.
icedchai
I hate useless, pointless work, even if I'm getting paid for it. Don't you want to build things that actually get used?
komali2
For me, yes of course! I do that in my spare time on FOSS projects.
datavirtue
This. I sit down the hall from the CEO of our company. I hear nearly every meeting and conversation that goes on. Don't think for a minute that most CEOs aren't scrounging money from useless bullshit circumstances half the time. They are very pragmatic and just really don't give a fuck where the money comes from.
WatchDog
Morality wise isn’t it the opposite? If you own the business, it’s your money to waste If you work for the business you are wasting others money.
ornornor
If you work for someone else and carry out your tasks as instructed, and have tried to bring up the absurdity of it all as specced but they insist you do it anyway then I don’t see what would be unethical about it? Only talking about brain dead/useless endeavors, not bad/evil projects.
bathtub365
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with also wanting the work you do to have a positive impact in the world. Whether it helps people, entertains them, or saves them time it feels great to get paid and also make a difference. Some may not be happy with just wanting a paycheque and that’s OK too.
fnordpiglet
I program because I could do nothing else. I do it because it is the thing I most want to do with any given moment. The fact they pay me to do it is fortunate otherwise I would be homeless and programming in a shelter somewhere. I over think work simply because the aspect of “work” is entirely incidental to what I do out of passion.

That said, I also never believe anything I do is useful and that also isn’t why I do what I do.

jrockway
I do the programming for free. Taking the annual leadership impact and cybersecurity training survey is what they pay me for.
throwway120385
The only reason to give a damn about what you're working on is to make sure you're accumulating good bullet points for your resume.
sfpotter
There are actually companies to work for where you can get involved and develop ownership over things, and where how well you do relates to the success of the business. If you have a good relationship with your coworkers, you may even want to do a good job to try to maximize the likelihood that not just you keep putting bread on the table but they do, too! Crazier things have happened.
throwway120385
I've been in that situation before, but I'm starting to get to a point in my career where I've basically plateaued. And before you tell me that I just need to buckle down and re-engage, the company I'm currently at gives across the board 2-3% raises every year to their top performers and my team has delivered some really key strategic projects, so there's not really any point to doing anything else at this company. It doesn't meaningfully change my compensation.
blharr
Good to know I'm not the only one...
gr8r
who else came looking for a comment like this...
vundercind
It’s goddamn rare to work on something useful.

I’m not sure more than 50% of the code I’ve written in about 20 years of this was ever actually used by someone who wasn’t, like, working on the project.

Much of the rest shouldn’t have been written. Total waste, usually easy to see.

A lot more that’s basically just rearranging shit for little reason.

Yeah… very little was useful.

At some point you just have to stop giving a shit. You’ll pay me how much to dig a hole then fill it back up over and over?! Sure thing, how deep do you want it?

fatnoah
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.

zelphirkalt
Great time to spend on whatever you want to learn about.
pjdesno
Started my career on ATM. Good way to develop an enduring cynicism about industry hype.
fatnoah
It was actually my second gig working on that as well. The first was a college internship writing management software for a 14 slot switch w/75Gb backplane. The best feature of the software was the "suit" command, which restarted the boards in all 14 slots in sequence, which created a nice light show. We used it whenever someone in a suit showed up in the lab.
OnACoffeeBreak
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.

woleium
i imagine 200k was peanuts compared to the cost of design and implementation. People are expensive!
IshKebab
> 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...

azhenley
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

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sspiff
Did you ever make that typed lisp compiler? Asking for a friend.
theihor
What are you saying? Making another lisp is useless?!
sspiff
No I'm looking for a small lisp to embed in a useless project of my own
amon22
Fennel might be a good choice for that
octokatt
I appreciate how making useless stuff is fun as a hobby, and enjoying that play is important. Even crows enjoy their sleds [0], that’s how important play is.

Needing to complete a project for the sake of your continued survival/paycheck, while adhering to specific criteria, is very much the opposite experience. A study done where _people were paid to put together Lego sets_ put together less of them when they had to watch the researcher take them apart immediately afterwards, despite intrinsically enjoying Legos [1].

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnI4dhZZxQ [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...

kn100
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.

Hackbraten
This is actually the most useful thing I’ve read in this whole comment section so far.

Thank you for reverse-engineering proprietary hardware and writing integration drivers for it. The world needs people like you.

Havoc
Something like buspirate might work
HeyLaughingBoy
That's far from useless though. There have been times where I've wished that I had an I2C expert so I could say "this thing is acting weird. Here's a bus analyzer and there's the code. Go fix it."
ghaff
There's definitely a difference between the utility of the final project/product and the utility to you personally based on what you learned/had fun with/got paid for along the way.
yjftsjthsd-h
Yeah, that's like... the polar opposite of this post. Frankly, that sounds both fun and useful.
jhallenworld
Long ago I wrote an FPGA image to convert I2C to serial for long-term logging, to catch that rare, once a week event:

https://github.com/jhallen/i2cmon

You capture the serial using minicom log to file or similar, then you can peruse the log at your leisure.

moomoo11
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.

Jtsummers
> 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.

wpietri
Definitely look at money, but also look at social power. Humans are primates, and primates have meticulously maintained status hierarchies. Actions driven by that may not "make sense". "Sense" came way later and it's still trying to catch up.

And one general rule I love here is POSIWID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

If you can set aside the nominal purpose of the system for a bit, you can start to see a lot of the machinery underneath.

HeyLaughingBoy
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?"
exe34
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?
dandanana
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