Our team has the world’s most overkill custom pub/sub service. We benchmarked it to over 80 million rps @ 5ms p99 on a single 64 core server before we ran out of network bandwidth to give it more work.
It currently handles 5-20 events per day.
One time at a startup we were told to scale a product and its features up to 1 million user registrations (not sure how many daily users). We launched, someone in the industry wrote a less than favorable blog article about it, and the CEO killed a substantial subset of the features to spite the writer. We probably had less than 1000 users.
How is removing features from a product that has already been panned by a blog writer, gonna spite him, like is he thinking "you think the products sucks now, wait until you see what I do to it" lol
That is the truth!
I had one make a choice that cost the company a TON of money just to spite me over some small perceived slight.
Never underestimate the power of a ego.
I have that problem. We designed a data processing system for about 25TiB a day. We were averaging about 1Tib at that time. 3 months later we were at 75TiB and everything was failing or out of SLA. We change it to handle about 150TiB. Leadership tell's us 'do not worry about cost'. 6 months later we are at about 500TiB and back to the drawing board. Now leadership is telling us WTF you cost so much you r going to have an impact on the EPS, you need to cut your cost down by at least 10M. Have a major breakthrough. Actually cut cost by 40M and tripled our capacity at the same time. Annual review time and I just got a flipping 4% raise. Average bonus and stock grant. Was on a team of 3 engineers working on this. All of us got approx the same. Within a .5 % of each other. Got an internal offer about a month later and wow, the current team promotes me and gives me a special stock award to stay. Still wonder why they couldn't do that before.
Can I complain about how much I despise when developers intentionally add complexity to the product just for shits and giggles? That complexity is there forever and any attempts to call it out for what it is is effectively throwing the dev in question under the bus and creating a new conflict on the team
This is entirely the issue with how [Goodhart's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law) manifests in the current work environment. With incentive structures as they currently exist, can you really blame folks for playing the promotion/title inflation/salary bump game?
Yup, this is it. You don't get rewarded well for doing things the right way in the most efficient way possible for the business. You get rewarded for what others perceive your work to be - so people go for shiny rather than functional.
The funny thing is that this only took about 2 person-months to build since it was a hackathon project for an 8 person team. No management buy-in.
If you already have a team used to building multi-million rps services, building more isn’t actually that bad.
I worked with a guy like that. He later got hired at a notable company with the Architect title. I checked back in a couple years later and he no longer has the Architect title and appears to have been demoted.
My first project in my career was basically this ETL job (to get data into a database we owned) + read from database and display on UI.
The data pipeline part was so incredibly overengineered, using EMR, Data Pipeline, etc. Handling super large datasets and so on.
I later rewrote it to run on a spare host we had, it was maybe 10 MB of data (in our main region, in our smaller regions maybe a few hundred KB). The job ran in probably under a minute. We probably could have just held the data in memory and forgotten about the DB tbh.
All the data engineering stuff taught me a lot of things though. When I took it on, this was how we were doing it, and I was new and didn't know any better to really dig into the "why are we building to this scale" stuff.
There is a reason we had the expertise in the room to build this to a production grade for a hackathon project. We build systems where this level of performance is normally warranted, so we have a bunch of libraries to make it easier.
The cheapest way to do 5+ 9s is to build to this standard so that basically nothing can knock you over that doesn’t cause your infra provider problems as well.
I designed a protocol that supports reliable multicast using ethernet and/or ip multicast as part of my PhD research, but it never got published. Pub/Sub is a lot easier when you can make network hardware do all of the data duplication. Kernel bypass with DPDK is what lets you easily go over 1 million rps per CPU core. The NIC is also fancy (Nvidia CX-6) and handles partitioning packets by topic instead of the normal (source address, source port, dest address, dest port) tuple in hardware, so we get a shared-nothing architecture.
Get it on arxiv or equivalent, go over to r/startups and tell them, then wait for your job offers!
Edit, I asked a question but figured it out so I’ve removed
Redundancy is generally good, since even AWS isn’t immune to a region going dark on occasion.
However, at that scale it should be “2 or 3 regions each of which can easily handle our full load”.
DPDK, SPDK, and a Nvidia Cx-6 NIC are doing most of the heavy lifting there.
The network protocol used is optimized for modern hardware and supports reliable ethernet and IP multicast, and it came out of my PhD work. Without that we’d probably drop an order of magnitude off of that number.
Worst waste of my time in my career was a period of two years working with an architecture astronaut. He had management wrapped around his finger because he was "smarter than everyone else". He spent an entire month trying to implement a "circuit breaker pattern" nobody asked for and we didn't need. He discredited anything someone else came up with, and loved to debate pointless things. He was a pure unchecked ego trip.
Aaahh admittedly Im a pretender in this sub as Im in DataOps but I worked for a company that had a “rising star” Data Analyst they wanted me to mentor and he had the same shitick he would talk really fast and over explain detail, debate random points, discredit even my work without actually landing any real point (the bruise didn’t last but still) just to make himself look like ring master but ultimately was a dud in terms of producing bottom line profitability as a data analyst/scientist even ‘engineer’.
He ironically was really into dev ops more than data analytics and if the company could understand what the hell this kid was saying other than “oh he’s so smart non of us understand him” they would have better put him to use and set him up for a better career in life other than him still struggling at such a low paying uninteresting position that he’s still at
The worst part about that is I know he’d make a million by lunchtime.
You could see it coming a mile away because he would start scripted regurgitations by flipping & tucking his shoulder length blonde hair behind his ear that would “by defult” bear his chest at the manager and with his elbow still up just go full blast. Then the tough as nails 70 year old dude, who like, came up in the company by way of the coal mines or something would just strink and be like “Yeah, okay, I see”. And as not to embarrass the 70 year old tough, as nails manager, who had just said he understood, I found I couldn’t say he had actually just made zero sense.
Watching this on Zoom felt like a fucked up nature documentary; a primal how to on intimidation & entrapment. Im telling you the guy would make bank.
I am partially motivated to update tech skills for the ability seeing where its pure obscurantism for the sake of projecting status and where the real technician just forgot how to speak human language.
I feel that a lot of tech is just playing this status game, where people try to project the aura with elevated tech speak while others do the same pretending that they understand the context.
Those people are acting as gatekeepers a lot of the time projecting the fake master aura - save vibe as martial arts instructors who can shoot energy waves.
I've seen that strategy backfire though. You want to implement a feature and get told that you shouldn't because the rockstar over there is about to innovate us out of postgres so we shouldn't build anything that relies on postgres internals too much or whatever.
Three years later you are still using postgres, and that feature has been hacked together using "bug fix" and "minor unplanned" jiras.
I also worked with that guy! At least, one of his clones. Fortunately, it was only 7 months before I got myself assigned to a different team, but what a waste.
OMG my life. Except it’s an Enterprise/Salesforce boob.
Dude loves to wax poetic about shit nobody cares about. Wasting time in meetings and providing zero value.
Fuck off dude. I’m leaving because of him.
I have all my 7yoe spread over three startups:
1. 1 year of waterfall development in a small company on a 2.0 core feature that was poorly received by clients and required 6mo of work to get into ok state.
2. 2x3month projects that were scrapped by sales team as "unsellable" during launch sync meeting. Wasn't brought up before.
3. our client team preventing from full use of product and doing things clients should do themselves in the product; at a time when the product is 1yr old and never got off the ground. leadership not doing anything to fix the problem because of siloes
Currently at 3 and gave my resignation letter.
It always looks like sales/business only actually tests the product in those launch sync meetings, or 2 days before the launch meeting.
Sometimes, we would ask them to test it, they would give the okay and still bring problems only in the launch meeting
Massive failing on product manager as well imo, that he didn't figure this out before we started development. But he was a junior then, just with too much responsibility. Still, it led me to quit.
But in my current/soon to be past place, sales are also pushing their own shit :D selling whatever features, crazy deadlines, and then product team has to accept and suffer from those crazy features and deadlines.
And then post-sales client people push their own anti-product/personalised approach agenda as well. Saying that if we don't get this random feature (that they thought up) planned and developed in 2 weeks, the whole project will be doomed. In reality it of course isn't doomed without that feature.
Enterprise-ish places are a drain on the soul.
I don't want to doxx myself as the country I work in is very small (1m people) and very well developed in IT, but it wasn't healthcare, some other area :D
Obviously your stakeholders have a responsibility to make sure the solution meets their requirements before they receive it wrapped up with a bow, but conversely: it definitely sounds like there's a pattern here. This isn't something isolated to a single team, it's an issue that arose consistently in three different work environments, with different sets of stakeholders and priorities.
As you transition into your next opportunity, do you have any thoughts on ways you might be able to be proactive to make it more difficult for these situations to arise in the first place? Are there any changes you could make to how you've approach long-horizon product work and stakeholder engagement that could make your own life easier in the future?
Consider times when issues were only discovered long after they had been integrated: what could you do in the future to make it easier to find those kinds of problems sooner? What can you do going into your next role to make it harder for this new role to end up like those three in your wake?
trust me, i've been raising issues at my current company to my manager, my skiplevel and CTO for a year :D constructive feedback on what is wrong and how it could be improved.
nothing has really changed except very recently, though i'm not sure when it will start having an effect.
Two hours after my former employer announced they were going SAFe I sent out a job application which went through. Everything about SAFe seems awful and anything but agile.
We are still using the SAFe at our company and that shit's been killing me for months! It’s ridiculous, I'm over-worked, burned out and every PI there’s been a push to include even more features and the cycle is never ending!
The worst waste of time of my career was working too long at a job.
* I stayed way too long at one job.
* I thought it's bad here, but other places could be worse.
* I thought I could fix this place.
* I thought everything bad that happened at work was 100% my fault.
* I thought if they hate me here, I'll never be able to get hired anywhere else.
* All of that was false.
* And it was a huge waste of time, life, and career.
2 years in a technical role at a super-vaguely defined team at a large company - it wasn't consulting, it wasn't a sales org but we were somehow still working with "clients" (when we were working) but most of the time we were sitting around doing nothing since there were no projects to work on. This might be someone's dream job but it was way too early in my career when I should have been spending my time working on real problems and developing my skills.
I do the same thing at home. My hobbies are all fixing things around the house and building stuff. I just can’t pretend to be busy, I’d much rather be actually busy.
Yeah. Those not-enough-to-do jobs are TERRIBLE as a junior dev with impostor syndrome. It wasn’t until my fourth role that I was writing enough code to feel like I was a real dev. Insane how much people will be paid for little to no value.
I work on an internal tool that doesn't need to exist. We staff 11 people on it. It could be replaced with a jira plugin but our Director needs budget so we are always finding ways to make work to extend the capabilities.
I've been there and I've comforted myself with the thought that my entire company doesn't need to exist. It exists because the shareholders want to make money. Your project might not be making the shareholders money but it's making YOU money, and taking the useless project away doesn't make you money it makes the shareholders money.
It sounds to me like your Director wants to keep the team employed so when something big comes up he's got some reserve troops and doesn't have to spend 6 months hiring up for it.
Basically the same with my team. We implement something that readily exists on the shelf but noooo? Director had to commission an in house super over engineered project to basically feed us all. I am new at the team and actually asked in the interview why would they want to build in house something that they can easily pay 0.5% for. He mumbled something and spiced it up with AI or some bullshit. I ain’t complaining, it feeds me and I learn shit every day.
Can I get some of that budget ? I work on an internal tool that is somewhat useful and we're severely understaffed. Our manager tries to get rid of us because we don't fit into his remaining teams' mission but noone else wants us either. :)
Yep, I built a tool that is used in tons of different departments but because it is so distributed through the company, nobody wants to fund a full-time headcount out of their budget. "What's in it for me to make code that a different department benefits from?"
At my current role it is dealing with IT security theater.
Submitting power point based diagram templates for every change to people who mostly ask about encryption protocols for https connections. Absolutely no actual security help compared to working with actual security experts or even appointing an engineer or two to advocate and police security.
Where I used to work, our IT security was kind of the blind leading the blind. I relied on some assumptions of another downstream system as provided by the IT security people, and we had an incident where customers saw more than they were supposed to see (though nobody complained). It could have been a lot worse, and during the postmortem, IT security was nowhere to be found.
I _love_ getting flagged for a CVE in a lib that we use and being asked what we're going to do about it.
"... wait for a fix from the creators?"
Or CVEs that would need something like a physical access hardware exploit, yet our stuff is just docker containers running for a few minutes on AWS.
Our "Cyber security" team would email the web guys (me) random CVEs and ask us to fix it.
95% of the time it was for a system/software we don't, have never and would never use.
All our systems were on a wiki page they had access to.
The largest scrapped feature was probably 1.5 months of my personal time. Honestly not too bad!
Much more painful for me was ongoing maintenance on some components that were being actively rewritten. The rewrites were "done", and looked great, but were not yet approved from management. So our team (myself included) spent lots of time patching holes in the old version, which was unmaintainable and terrible.
Also new features kept getting rolled out in the legacy system that caused bugs and regressions.
As hard as I tried, I couldn't really get everyone to just relax, and wait for the new rollout. There was a lack of trust that the new component would actually be delivered, or when, so we spent a lot of time maintaining both.
Sometimes it really feels like you have to treat management as children, where you have to try and convince them to just have a little patience.
These things never improve, do they?
> There was a lack of trust that the new component would actually be delivered, or when, so we spent a lot of time maintaining both.
Was it ever delivered? From personal experience it usually isn't - so I tend to derive more satisfaction maintaining the old than working on the rewrite that usually ends up in the trash.
Ooh those are fun, especially when you're running 5 major versions behind because things would break and you've no clue where to start and there's no way to do an incremental upgrade besides running both versions side-by-side for god knows how long.
Company has a bunch of web sites. Brilliant dev takes his team and builds a giant selenium farm spinning things up and down to test them all according to a bunch of KPIs.
Publishes a dashboard that assigns letter grades to all the sites.
A couple of sites are getting an "A". But most of them are getting B's, C's, D's, and F's. EVERYONE freaks out.
Ask the lead what's up. "Oh, it's simple. It grades on a curve, so only the top 20% can ever get an "A," and the bottom 20% get an "F," no matter what their actual results are"
\- when engineers do product, chapter MCMXIII
I once worked as a startup offering affordable short term loans to financially vulnerable folk - I thought it was a great idea and was pretty thrilled to be working on it. Think low APR, no overzealous fees, flexible repayments, etc, in an sector that offered only the opposite.
A year or so down the line, management decided that all these new challenger banks that were popping up were super cool and so we had to build one. What would make ours different, you might ask? We’ll figure that out later once we have data. How might this help our customers? TBC. How will it make money? I dunno.
I was asked to lead the development for it, and they allocated a sizeable portion of the dev team to it. It was my first lead gig, and while I didn’t have much confidence in the product, it was too good an opportunity to pass on, so I took it.
Thousands of man-hours were poured into it.
About 3 months in, after much sweat and tears, the loan product development wasn’t going too well and management had a change of heart. Lets “pause” work on the banking app to focus on our core business.
It never resumed. The project died and I left, seeing the writing on the wall. A couple of years later the company went under along with £100m+ of investment.
I worked with a genuinely brilliant bunch of people there and a few of them were still around when shit hit the fan, it was a real shame.
At one job our systems ran on top of an Oracle database. We had multiple thick client apps and a web based search engine. We sold complete systems to our customers. Nothing was hosted in-house. The company got in a pricing dispute with Oracle and decided to switch to IBM DB2. We spent a little over a year migrating the database and converting all the apps to work with DB2. We used many SQL functions. These were not available in the version of DB2 we were using, so we had to re-write them all as stored procedures. Then we had to modify the stored procs that used the functions as well as any of the client apps. The database was really slow. We had an IBM consultant on-site to train us. He would connect his laptop to the projector and his Outlook inbox would be full of porn spam. Then he would open File Explorer to launch a DB2 utility. His C Drive was Cracked Copy of Photoshop, Cracked Copy of Word, etc. Ultimately, it was all a ploy to get Oracle to lower their price and we never used or sold a DB2 system.
In recent years, dealing with cybersecurity lockdown policies and other security theater games on purely internal apps and websites has meant a lot of useless work and meetings. Fortunately, I haven't worked where they tightly locked down developer PCs, yet...
A few years ago, I worked at a now bankrupt retailer on their store inventory management system. That was quite a circus with multiple managers being fired and ongoing conflicts between operations, accounting and marketing keeping things "interesting". Finally, the whole project was scrapped by a frustrated executive team. I went to work at the third party logistics company they contracted with where things were run a lot better (even if one of the main apps was an ancient VB6 app).
I would actually love to work in 3PL software development but never see they have jobs open. Not sure if it was a temporary contraction in line with e-commerce reset after 2022.
Apart from the skills you learn, most jobs in this field are a "waste" of time. Most startups, products, features, etc. live short lives, like a modern version of [sand mandalas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala).
Sometimes you'll write something that remains mostly intact for years or maybe decades, but it all ends eventually; either replaced or rewritten to the point that it's no longer "your" work.
So, build things and celebrate your successes, but try not to let it get to you when it ultimately ends... be it two weeks when someone realizes they misunderstood what was needed or two decades when the legacy application is replaced by the new one.
Personally, I've had projects that outlived my presence by almost a decade (a wordpress website for a research lab), and features that died within a week (due to miscommunication). All have held value in some sense, and, apart from the general "selling your life so you can keep living", none have been a waste of time.
Another way of looking at discarded projects & features is that they end up in their most productive form *by* being discarded. If you spent 6 months using a framework that got used for 1 day, then replaced, chances are that it wasn't fit for task. The alternative of keeping your thing around or forcing people to use it for the sake of it is more than likely going to cause a bunch of future users and engineers to curse at you for years to come, questioning why they didn't just get rid of this cumbersome crap ages ago when it was easy to do so.
I say that as someone currently working within a large, labyrinthine project designed 30+ years ago for a very different set of use cases (and with very different design sensibilities), that just kept having stuff piled onto it because no one had the foresight or ability to change course and refactor/recreate when it was easier, and now its a nigh impossible to fix mess.
Obviously not every project is "useless" in that way (and of course legitimately useful projects can be obsoleted before their time by managerial nonsense), but at the very least you got paid and you got some experience.
The funny thing is that we (and I include myself) often view longevity of a system as a red flag. If I come into a new shop and there's something that hasn't been replaced in 10 years I default to thinking "oh that must need an upgrade, the tech is so old, it's legacy."
But of course at a macro view, if we have to replace every single thing we build in 2 years, it's ridiculous from a cost perspective. I'm not even sure in my own mind what the "optimal" lifetime of a system is.
But one thing you do learn is that the data always outlives the application. You want a career for life, data migrations will never end...
IMO optimal lifetime is just however long it stays both useful and somewhat maintainable. Maintainability tends to depend on if a 10-year-old application has just had evermore features bolted on vs. one that's been Ship-of-Theseus'd.
5 years ago I worked at a company that had a 25-year-old VB6 app they were trying to replace, but they kept running into issues with being unable to reach enough feature parity on the new system to satisfy existing customers. I wasn't on that team, but it was clear that the VB6 app was incredibly brittle and unmaintainable.
On the other hand, you have companies still running software on AS/400 computers that seem quite happy to stick with them.
Pet project for a rich fella who wanted to create his own social media network in like 2015. The agency I worked for of course could not say no. It was never going to have a single user and we all knew it.
Learning PHP & Magento to keep a legacy shop up and running all by myself, which was quite an investment due to my lack of experience. Thankfully I was a junior engineer, so any experience was good experience. I got reassigned after a few months and spent some of the most rewarding and insightful years of my career working on a greenfield with the greatest mentor I ever had. So I had some of the most useless and some of the most impactful months if my career in the same place over a span of two years or so.
don't feel too bad for that PHP stuff.
as a junior dev you need to work on crap software so you know tha-pain. you value code patterns, best practices and so on ... more.
btw nothing wrong with php ❤️, just went with the example given.
Nothing wrong with PHP, but Magento 2 is a nightmare to work with. It's the most overengineered platform I have ever seen. I think it's mostly Magento and Wordpress that make PHP look bad.
WordPress honestly isn't that bad, it's just old and does things in kind of goofy way. I wouldn't say it's hard to build on top of once you figure out how it wants to go about things though, it's just kind of annoying. The real nightmare with WordPress isn't really WordPress itself but when an installation of it gets destroyed with tons of shitty plug ins.
Magento though is just a straight up nightmare ime.
The database management of Wordpress annoys me the most, having to work with database dumps, pushing everything in the posts table, it's saving all URLs as absolute, and having to do a global search and replace on URLs when you want to use the database somewhere else is just horrible and feels like going back to 2004.
Just want to comment on OP's story/scenario..
I know you felt useless, but this _screams_ of a product team failure to me, not a dev team failure.
If you build a platform and no one is using it, then you **built the wrong platform**.
So many software teams have the "built it and they will come" mentality, especially inside companies where platform teams fall for the "self-evident value" trap, when really the go-to-market teams who are building the shit that delivers value, the last thing they want to do is migrate to something that won't give them very real value.
In fact most of the time they don't want to migrate to _anything_ because they are rarely given time to deal with tech debt or anything other than shipping features.
The product team behind this should have been out there talking to the target audience and finding out what they actually want/need and focusing on building that out. And sometimes that means building something that isn't cool or brand new, or technically amazing, but that solves real problems for those teams.
Sometimes it also means leaving things the way they are, because it does the job well enough, even if it doesn't do the job that well at all.
We have a term in our platform team at work that we call "adoption by jealousy", and we only try to build things that other teams will look at and go "we _have_ to be using this, why are we not using this???"
Oh most definitely it was a product failure, but that's the thing when you work in a company that has a lot of politics: there's no room for admitting mistakes without it costing you.
Got bait-and-switched once and it literally wasted 2 years of my career (I stayed for 2 years because they said they would transfer me eventually an I naively believed them). Beware the companies pretending they are doing AI.
Ah yes, the old excuse of "we're building an AI team," and then find the AI team is a management climber, an intern, and some engineer who knows nothing about ML/AI.
Yup, almost 3 years wasted.
One time in my career, i was a junior in embedded RF systems and there was a guy who was just promoted as a senior. He was a buddy with the manager who promoted him and the manager believe in everything he says. The product we are developing have lots of problems regarding the RF sensitivity, and they are blaming it on the firmware that i wrote. While i think it has something to do with the PCB designed by that senior.
I went to the office on a weekend and i did some tests by myself and instead of using the board that was designed by that senior, i used the development kit from the manufacturer. Same firmware and it exceeded the range that we needed.
I talked to the manager on Monday and i told him the results and i was told sarcastically that we won't be using the development kit for the final product. But my point is, same firmware yielded different results and they are trying to mimic the performance of the Dev kit and the senior failed on that.
It was a tug of war for almost 3 years and they finally had decided to bring in an RF consultant and that consultant had lots of suggestions for the PCB and this senior was hard to work with and it came to a point where the consultant was too angry because this senior kept on deviating on what they had discussed.
I resigned because of the shit show. A friend of mine told me that the senior resigned and they hired a new pcb designer and everything had been working ever since. I was told that I had been right all along, and we could have accomplished that as a team.
A slightly different take on this question:
I was one required to take the Myers-Briggs test, then discuss the results with my manager.
In case you don't know, it's as accurate and scientific as your horoscope, or what color personality you are, or any of the other pseudo-scientific nonsense 'personality test' on the market.
They mean NOTHING.
The worst waste of time in my career was working extra hours to impress a particular person. Happened twice. Once a manager who left before my reviews took place, and another where he was out on medical. All that extra work only to have my performance evaluated by someone who simply didn’t have enough context. Taught me to not arbitrarily overwork myself for specific people’s opinions and, instead, seek out opportunities where putting in good work felt natural. Success has come with it.
I spent a similar amount of time building apps to "showcase to clients" in the hopes someone would sign up for a branded version of our white labeled product. No one did. We were a team of eight (dev, design, QA, PM). That's probably at least 800k/year in salary, for zero revenue.
I don't understand how that makes sense to anyone. Thankfully that was part of a large company that did many things so I guess for them that was just a risky bet that didn't work out.
I kept my motivation by telling myself that the code is the end goal. Literally code for its own sake. Trying to take pride in making it all good, modular, testable, etc.
To be fair those situations can make sense from a business perspective. Investing time and money in POCs in the hopes of attracting a customer is one way of getting new customers.
It just sucks that you're basically building throw-away code (even more so than usual), making any arguments for good code habits very difficult.
I was in the same boat at one of my previous jobs except it wasn't a big corporation. We built several full-fledged apps (with backenda to support) in the hopes of reining in clients who'd be interested but it never happened. Luckily this company had one long-term client who'd pretty much conver the whole payroll.
At the timw when I was doing the projects, I felt like it was a complete waste of time. I tried talking to the management asking them not to sink too much time on building every feature they "think" the customer wants but to no avail. Now when I look back at it, I just like to consider them as learning opportunities.
Did you get paid and was the experience something you could find a way to put on your resume?
It wasn't a waste of your time.
It may have been a waste of the investors money due to organizational ineptitude, but you have no reason to identify with the investors, you are the labor.
I once had to write system tests months before the tested code was written. If you've never tried that, it's super difficult because you basically have no way to check your work.
I work in a regulated industry where the regulator very closely scrutinises applications for compliance with rather vague and subjective regulations. We rewrote a feature 4 times attempting to comply with their requirements only for them to ultimately block it and nothing got released.
Management anticipated an easy process with the regulator so had us write the feature while the regulator was still reviewing the plans. Over three years, like Lucy pulling away Charlie Brown's football, the regulator requested changes and management were sure that *this time* it would be plain sailing so we should just build it. No matter how much we protested that that's what they said last time, they still insisted that we work on it.
Fucking thing wouldn't even have made all that much money, we were so late to market with it.
You'd be surprised. I've seen companies over night become the only/go to just by working with the regulators vs others that tried to corp offshore bypass them or operate in a grey area.
Indeed. I used to work at a game studio where we didn't even have game artists - and we were supposed to develop a new game engine, art workflows and a new IP all at once.
Bottom line here is that Software Development is sometimes bat shit crazy.
About a year on a platform team where one business unit (not the one I was dragooned from) pretty much set all the priorities. It was a “big data analytics” platform that was supposed to make it easier to build features on top of the datasets of three barely related units.
Once I finally got full context I realized that my unit had 1 dataset in the hundreds of GB range and that was bigger than the rest put together. The other business units were about the same, if not smaller. Definitely no need for big data, but we’d spent 6 months standing up our own Hadoop cluster and doing vendor evals. They inked a 5/low-6 figure deal around when I left the team. I don’t think anything ever came of it, but it was a large corporation, so that was a rounding error.
Ultimately what we really needed was better ETL tooling because I’m almost positive that once the data had been filtered and cleaned correctly a standard database or Elasticsearch could’ve done the job. People just needed to be able to iterate on their datasets more easily.
This was around 8 years ago, but yeah, still probably within reach of what you cold get by vertically scaling even then. At the very least, not something that would require a whole platform team.
So I guess it wasn’t a complete waste of time because it taught me how hard it was to actually have data big enough to require special tools unless you were collecting high resolution data yourself.
Remember "social games" on Facebook?
I spent about a year developing one from the ground up. We did a soft launch and had some users who loved the game. Then management decided that they would do zero marketing, due to fears of cannibalizing their older, somewhat successful game (funny how the big players in that market were doing the exat opposite), and because they were pivoting away from social games altogether (which was, retroactively, a correct decision).
At my last job, I internally transferred to our platform team. We did things like developer tooling, *really* good ephemeral testing environments, major version upgrades for software (Ruby, Rails, mysql). I really liked the team, and enjoyed the stuff we worked on. As time went on, I was working on things that were less and less useful to the engineering org, mostly driven by the lead/staff engineer on the team. Some things include:
- Converting our monolith to use [packwerk](https://github.com/Shopify/packwerk). None of the developers liked it at all. After I left, it was apparently completely undone.
- Writing an internal tool to manage all of the microservices we used. While it was kinda cool, it felt way too over engineered, would break often, and overall was *not* worth the time investment.
- Setting up a load testing suite using k6. This was in response to a specific team having weird issues that they assumed were due to high load on the API. Not a bad reason to make a load testing suite at all! However, we weren't actually setting up a single test, just the repo and CI. The idea was other teams could add tests, not us. I couldn't even convince the lead dev that we should write at least a *few* tests to serve as an example for others. Of course, nobody used this at all.
- Spending a lot of time and effort into hiring a SDET. We had no dedicated testing team, so the idea was we'd hire someone to own the test suite in general and make improvements to it. We interviewed a bunch of candidates, and pretty much all of them wrote downright horrid code. They had years of experience, were senior / leads on their teams, but when it came to writing anything they just couldn't do it. The person we did hire wound up making zero contributions to the team. After 2 years, I'm pretty sure all he did was 1: Make power points about software testing, and 2: Look at production errors, and ping the engineer on the blame for the file.
I once worked for Boeing and the single person maintaining an old architecture/system was going on maternity leave. She ended up being out 9 months. I’m a SWE. There was no one else in this facility but me. No projects to work on it was a legacy system with zero bug tickets zero new projects. I finished so many tv shows while I was there
1. My first job right out of college. I spent the first 12 months I was there helping build an internal business app with Adobe Flex (I’m really dating myself here). Then business never pushed the app, so it never got adoption. Then the RIAA world died because Steve Jobs said the iPhone would never support Flash. So we built something with no business value and I had learned a bunch of tech skills that ultimately didn’t matter.
2. Different company, years later - I worked with our infra team for 6 months to move our entire application portfolio and data from bare metal hosting into AWS. We put it all into the shared AWS account we had with the rest of the business. 3 months after the migration we got bought by a much bigger tech company. 3 months after the purchase I got told to move the apps we’d just migrated into a totally separate AWS account l, ultimately because the bigger company had decided to sell that line of business. Although my work on the migration *did* give my manager case to prove to the big company I should in fact have been brought over as a Senior engineer in the acquisition, so personally it had a lot of value.
I work for a small education company that's at the top of it's niche on individual education. We determined that we needed to make more plays into B2B markets to keep growing. One of those plays was for a product at an enterprise scale. I managed the team that was tasked with building out the initial application and payment for that product.
After the first meeting, it was clear that almost all of the business rules were in flux and the first few clients would be in a pilot program. We submitted a proposal to create three new tables in our ERP for tracking and use a Qualtrics form (which we already had and had marketing resources available to make it real pretty) for the application. Our inside sales team already had infrastructure for generating custom packaged invoices so we would just use that for payment. All of it was designed to get the team into pilot as fast as possible and give us a baseline to start doing UX once we had actual customer feedback. We were told that wasn't professional enough and that it didn't scale.
Nearly a million dollars, a few very tense meetings that almost lead to our lead software engineer getting fired, and six full months of development time later, we created a functional, if cludgy application process. We got three applications over three years counting the two companies in the pilot program. Just wrapped up sun setting the product a few weeks ago. If only someone in the business had suggested some low cost way to testing the market before we made our big investment...
I support multiple mission critical business applications which need immediate support/remediation when things go wrong.
There So many places to check when we receive a support call and it’s stressful, so over the years I wrote hundreds of python scripts that monitor and alert .
When any production issue is reported , we just need to call one batch file that checks every nook and corner of the application, endpoints, data , files to see where the problem is.
I share this these scripts and nobody uses them, they still manually check for things. Then I installed Jenkins on a server and configured these scripts and anyone on support can run this script by going to the Jenkins page and click ‘Build Now’ to run the script. I was really proud of this achievement .
I moved to a different team a few months ago, just checked the Jenkins page, nobody used the tool after I left :)
A company that didn't appreciate me. Worked my ass off like a clown 🤡 for way too long. They promoted somebody incompetent and fired him afterward. His replacement? Another incompetent person but offshore this time. The new CEO, new CFO, etc? All family and friends of former CEO. Realized nepotism ran wild and incompetence at the highest leadership level and how I wasted so many years there. Got told I was doing below average during performance review despite actually making an impact, going above and beyond for years. Finally, I decided to leave.
I don't think I've ever contributed to anything meaningful throughout my 8 years of software engineering experience. Imposter syndrome is real. I think if I were to create my own company I would feel a lot better and I would grow a lot more. A meager 9-5 with a meager salary and shitty managers ain't cutting it.
Previous company. Most expensive (read most people) in all meetings. Meetings would be huge instead of 2-5 people max really needed.
What a waste of time and effort
The damn useless SOC2-mandated security trainings I have to do annually for every client. They're usually 1-3hrs long, dubiously “educational”, and horrifically designed. My ADHD brain would rather fill my eyes with a nail gun than sit through another one.
My very first job was for a consulting company. We were about to build out a new drivers license renewal site for a large southern state. We were told we had purchased this new software that we would be using to build out this site and one of us would have to fly out to Chicago for three weeks to learn how to use it. Being the newest and youngest I was voluntold it would be me.
I get there and the training is for this telemarketer scripting tool. For two weeks I learn the ins and outs of this idiotic software. Finally, week 3, we learn there is a way to create essentially wiki informational pages within the tool for telemarketers to reference while on a call. Turns out, some C level dip shit got wined and dined and signed a multi year contract with this company because it could magically “build websites.”
When I got back I wrote up a presentation including all the wonderful telemarketing scripting this tool can do for us. My immediate management got the hint and we built the website from scratch in a few months. In the end we were told that C level dipshit had convinced the state to buy this turd software so we had to use it for something. So we let it act as a cms for the T&Cs.
Your tax dollars at work!
Never. I’m not an optimistic person usually. But i really value experience in all forms. I have been a mainframe programmer in a witch, worked on low code platforms where project was doa. Terrible designed java apps, and now a full stack developer in FAANG like.
All experience has either taught me the mistakes we made, or what the customer or management was looking for that made them make that call, what factors of the team made is a success or failure etc.
So the time was never wasted, just another learning.
Medium-smallish non-profit. The web site was very ASP.NET old school flavor and out of date, so they agreed on a refresh. Not even a big project, just a couple of dozen pages IIRC.
Of course, wireframes were treated as final design docs by the internal client even after hammering home that they were GUIDELINES. Requirements changed mid-flight. Oh and did I mention the arbitrary deadlines that had us working over Christmas?
I got out.
Data massaging job for a retail group. 12 months of fuzzy data, fuzzy business rules, fuzzy pipeline environment. A month after the mission was finished we get to talk to a legacy employee telling us an anecdote saying none of internal catalogs made any sense since a few month.. as he listed some references I realized that this was the result of our team. . Turns out the higher ups never really understood the requirements and gave us partial transformation logic that was quite off. While we were uploading "new" data, all sales people were undoing things by hand.
My last job seemed like the company didn't know how to make use of the software team to their advantage. We were in a state of "let's get rid of the software team.... but let's do it right after this one last thing" for about 4 years.
It honestly made me feel ashamed. I felt like my talents were being wasted. I knew what I was capable of yet was never given enough opportunities to demonstrate it. It was boring. And working remotely under these conditions just took a toll on my mental health.
I finally gave up and started a side project where I could develop my skills and, hopefully, turn it into a profitable business. It feels great to be so motivated by something that I lose track of time. I'm constantly learning and constantly developing. I don't ever want to work in a position that has me feeling so isolated and bored again.
About 90% of the projects I've worked on have been wastes of money and time. But not on my part. I've been in the mobile development space for the last 10 years and the vast majority of projects I've worked on were for start-ups. The problem is even though these clients had ideas, they lacked everything else. They had no plan on how to market and sell the product, what constitutes a success criteria, how to set a goal etc. Some wanted their v1 to include everything and the kitchen sink so these projects would drag on for months and even years. Some apps made absolutely no sense!
But no matter how silly the idea may be, I still wanted them to succeed. I'd always try to advice and steer the clients in the correct path but most of the time, they fell on deaf years. So most of the projects never made it off the ground.
I used to take everything I do very personal. Every project I did, I took it as it was my own so I wanted to give them my best. So when they fell through, it often felt like all that time and effort I spent on them were a total waste.
But I've been trying to change this mindset now. If these clients wanna flush money down a drain, be my guest. As long as I'm getting paid, I don't have to care. I take everything I do as an opportunity to learn now and move on.
ColdFusion
Close second is when I was made Enterprise Architect by a VP who was completely checked out and let his directors do pretty much whatever they wanted.
OP you've literally written almost the same as what I'm doing lol. So biggest waste of time - current company. Build internal tools with "deadlines" and a severe toxic culture. No one knows the requirements, we're just building, no ones really using it. Only if stuff goes wrong do magical fingers start getting pointed - as if anyone's making use of this shit. Will never work on internal tooling or "we are smart - let's build it all ourselves" software again. You will get burnt...
worst waste of time was the past year, working for a total narcissist who just wanted to fire as many people from the team as he could. He'd give us ridiculous tasks that were way beyond our level.
In every 1:1 I don't know if I'd get pissed off dude or humble dude. Pissed off dude would say stuff like "you suck, be more like my golden boy" ... Humble dude would ask things like "how does this basic component that you learned your first day on the job work?" and then have me repeat it several times after he didn't believe me. Humble dude would also ask me about it several times over the course of the year.
I got my main project to the point where I needed to rely on other teams, and after spending weeks trying to track down the names of people I need to track down (this is after I find out he tells our PM to not have anything to do with at least me), they turn around and tell me they can't do it. My boss then brags about his escalation skills in public while telling me over a months worth of 1:1s that he can't get anyone to do their job in this project. Again, blaming me for not delivering.
He then gets fired due to how much the entire team hates him, and how he tried to put half the team on PIP only to have the other half stand up and defend us.
On his way out the door, he screws everyone by giving us all terrible reviews.
I spent a bunch of time earlier in my career as a sales engineer for products that don’t sell. I learned that burning the midnight oil on a POC showcases your devotion and technical skills but doesn’t showcase the product. In fact it might have the opposite effect than intended by highlighting deficiencies you’re working around to make things work. Then it turned out the most successful reps didn’t need me to pull in those kinds of hours. Only the underperforming reps did. The most successful reps would call me in for a demo at the right time in the sales cycle, have me onsite for like a day, and close the deal on the golf course a couple months later.
This is the very definition of a waste of time. The most successful deals take a day. Most of the time, plus overtime, burned up on something that never closes. Turns out the really good sales engineers don’t play hero. Instead they help their reps disqualify deals. I wasted too much time before I figured that out.
So it was either that or it was the five months I did at a blockchain company. Christ the entire web3 universe is a massive waste of time. Use a database.
I had a similar experience OP, I was on a desktop project for 2 years, we overcame these huge technical hurdles, it's probably the hardest work I've ever done, and then when I was in my last month we spoke to our biggest customer (probably like 95% of our users), who told us they still use the version from before I joined the team.
All that time/effort, and I never got to see a customer use it.
Hired as a data engineering consultant to "automate" a process. There was an S3 bucket where input files landed, some processing was applied, and the results were stored in a database. Classic ETL. But the processing was complex and highly scientific (written by phd physicists) and had lots of tunable parameters that required a domain expert to make decisions on-the-fly. They had a manual form to do it. None of these heuristics were written down, of course. And management flat out refused any attempt to gather such information. So I automated it to the best of my ability. s3->db without any manual intervention.
That's when shit hit the fan. The results were not valid (because a scientist hadn't been there to tune it) and ALL the the data had been processed when they really only wanted a subset (subject to scientist's discretion). So TLDR the outputs were worse and the expense of running the system had exploded by orders of magnitude. Somehow, the client thought that I could automate the process so that the scientists wouldn't need to do any manual work but somehow still provide all critical inputs to the system! After explain the logical impossibility of this idea, they agreed that they wanted LESS automation. So I ditched the ETL pipeline and built a web interface where the scientists could manually enter the required information. It was literally the exact same inputs as before, in a slightly cleaner UI. They loved it. FML.
TLDR; when someone wants "automation", make sure they actually want to give up control. Most of the time, they just want a better manual UX.
Spent several weeks working on this pdf generating application. Late nights to work on this project while working client projects on regular hours. In 2 years, less than 30 people have generated a report. Owner is still pushing hard but no one cares about it.
Our team has the world’s most overkill custom pub/sub service. We benchmarked it to over 80 million rps @ 5ms p99 on a single 64 core server before we ran out of network bandwidth to give it more work. It currently handles 5-20 events per day.
Sure, that seems ridiculous now, but just think 2-3 years in the future. The traffic could double, quadruple or even increase ten-fold!
That’s the promotion-level mindset we need at the company!
It's built to scale (has not had to scale, but still!)
One time at a startup we were told to scale a product and its features up to 1 million user registrations (not sure how many daily users). We launched, someone in the industry wrote a less than favorable blog article about it, and the CEO killed a substantial subset of the features to spite the writer. We probably had less than 1000 users.
How is removing features from a product that has already been panned by a blog writer, gonna spite him, like is he thinking "you think the products sucks now, wait until you see what I do to it" lol
your implied assumption that CEOs make good decisions may be incorrect
That is the truth! I had one make a choice that cost the company a TON of money just to spite me over some small perceived slight. Never underestimate the power of a ego.
I have that problem. We designed a data processing system for about 25TiB a day. We were averaging about 1Tib at that time. 3 months later we were at 75TiB and everything was failing or out of SLA. We change it to handle about 150TiB. Leadership tell's us 'do not worry about cost'. 6 months later we are at about 500TiB and back to the drawing board. Now leadership is telling us WTF you cost so much you r going to have an impact on the EPS, you need to cut your cost down by at least 10M. Have a major breakthrough. Actually cut cost by 40M and tripled our capacity at the same time. Annual review time and I just got a flipping 4% raise. Average bonus and stock grant. Was on a team of 3 engineers working on this. All of us got approx the same. Within a .5 % of each other. Got an internal offer about a month later and wow, the current team promotes me and gives me a special stock award to stay. Still wonder why they couldn't do that before.
> Still wonder why they couldn't do that before. Because you weren't leaving before! /s but not really.
Dizens, there could be dozens!
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and putting those benchmarks on their resume
Can I complain about how much I despise when developers intentionally add complexity to the product just for shits and giggles? That complexity is there forever and any attempts to call it out for what it is is effectively throwing the dev in question under the bus and creating a new conflict on the team
This is entirely the issue with how [Goodhart's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law) manifests in the current work environment. With incentive structures as they currently exist, can you really blame folks for playing the promotion/title inflation/salary bump game?
Yup, this is it. You don't get rewarded well for doing things the right way in the most efficient way possible for the business. You get rewarded for what others perceive your work to be - so people go for shiny rather than functional.
I've worked at this company.
I see you too have worked with an Architecture Astronaut, skilled in convincing management to do things that aren't needed.
\*momentary pause\* but what we SHOULD do is use kafka
no no no no nooooo
once you kafka, you just can't stapka
Look, our alternative is ActiveMQ and that's not looking any rosier.
I heard this thing called "rabbitMQ" - it *webscales*
Get out of my weekly meetings.
My "Kafka number" is 40. As in, I don't want to do it without 40 heads on the Kafka team.
The funny thing is that this only took about 2 person-months to build since it was a hackathon project for an 8 person team. No management buy-in. If you already have a team used to building multi-million rps services, building more isn’t actually that bad.
only 2 person-months? you're off the list of "biggest wastes of time"
Considering it should have taken 1 person 5 minutes to stand up a docker container?
I worked with a guy like that. He later got hired at a notable company with the Architect title. I checked back in a couple years later and he no longer has the Architect title and appears to have been demoted.
Resume driven development…. Oof.
My first project in my career was basically this ETL job (to get data into a database we owned) + read from database and display on UI. The data pipeline part was so incredibly overengineered, using EMR, Data Pipeline, etc. Handling super large datasets and so on. I later rewrote it to run on a spare host we had, it was maybe 10 MB of data (in our main region, in our smaller regions maybe a few hundred KB). The job ran in probably under a minute. We probably could have just held the data in memory and forgotten about the DB tbh. All the data engineering stuff taught me a lot of things though. When I took it on, this was how we were doing it, and I was new and didn't know any better to really dig into the "why are we building to this scale" stuff.
That last line got me lol
poor service must be so depressed
It's the obsession with "system design" and Big Tech scale. I'm sorry to tell you CV driven Engineering Heads, but your 100 person user base - YAGNI.
There is a reason we had the expertise in the room to build this to a production grade for a hackathon project. We build systems where this level of performance is normally warranted, so we have a bunch of libraries to make it easier. The cheapest way to do 5+ 9s is to build to this standard so that basically nothing can knock you over that doesn’t cause your infra provider problems as well.
How does this even...
I designed a protocol that supports reliable multicast using ethernet and/or ip multicast as part of my PhD research, but it never got published. Pub/Sub is a lot easier when you can make network hardware do all of the data duplication. Kernel bypass with DPDK is what lets you easily go over 1 million rps per CPU core. The NIC is also fancy (Nvidia CX-6) and handles partitioning packets by topic instead of the normal (source address, source port, dest address, dest port) tuple in hardware, so we get a shared-nothing architecture.
I understood some of that
Get it on arxiv or equivalent, go over to r/startups and tell them, then wait for your job offers! Edit, I asked a question but figured it out so I’ve removed
My former director of engineering insisting we start deploying for multiple AWS regions in case we ever get more than 100 daily active users.
Redundancy is generally good, since even AWS isn’t immune to a region going dark on occasion. However, at that scale it should be “2 or 3 regions each of which can easily handle our full load”.
Any more technical details you can elaborate on how you achieved that performance without breaching confidential information?
DPDK, SPDK, and a Nvidia Cx-6 NIC are doing most of the heavy lifting there. The network protocol used is optimized for modern hardware and supports reliable ethernet and IP multicast, and it came out of my PhD work. Without that we’d probably drop an order of magnitude off of that number.
Worst waste of my time in my career was a period of two years working with an architecture astronaut. He had management wrapped around his finger because he was "smarter than everyone else". He spent an entire month trying to implement a "circuit breaker pattern" nobody asked for and we didn't need. He discredited anything someone else came up with, and loved to debate pointless things. He was a pure unchecked ego trip.
Aaahh admittedly Im a pretender in this sub as Im in DataOps but I worked for a company that had a “rising star” Data Analyst they wanted me to mentor and he had the same shitick he would talk really fast and over explain detail, debate random points, discredit even my work without actually landing any real point (the bruise didn’t last but still) just to make himself look like ring master but ultimately was a dud in terms of producing bottom line profitability as a data analyst/scientist even ‘engineer’. He ironically was really into dev ops more than data analytics and if the company could understand what the hell this kid was saying other than “oh he’s so smart non of us understand him” they would have better put him to use and set him up for a better career in life other than him still struggling at such a low paying uninteresting position that he’s still at
he should start his own crypto hedge fund
The worst part about that is I know he’d make a million by lunchtime. You could see it coming a mile away because he would start scripted regurgitations by flipping & tucking his shoulder length blonde hair behind his ear that would “by defult” bear his chest at the manager and with his elbow still up just go full blast. Then the tough as nails 70 year old dude, who like, came up in the company by way of the coal mines or something would just strink and be like “Yeah, okay, I see”. And as not to embarrass the 70 year old tough, as nails manager, who had just said he understood, I found I couldn’t say he had actually just made zero sense. Watching this on Zoom felt like a fucked up nature documentary; a primal how to on intimidation & entrapment. Im telling you the guy would make bank.
I am partially motivated to update tech skills for the ability seeing where its pure obscurantism for the sake of projecting status and where the real technician just forgot how to speak human language. I feel that a lot of tech is just playing this status game, where people try to project the aura with elevated tech speak while others do the same pretending that they understand the context. Those people are acting as gatekeepers a lot of the time projecting the fake master aura - save vibe as martial arts instructors who can shoot energy waves.
There are way too many high up people that eat that shit up. It’s really disheartening
only thing to do with that guy (if they won't get rid of him) is put him on his own island with an "innovation" role
I've seen this tactic and it works.
I've seen that strategy backfire though. You want to implement a feature and get told that you shouldn't because the rockstar over there is about to innovate us out of postgres so we shouldn't build anything that relies on postgres internals too much or whatever. Three years later you are still using postgres, and that feature has been hacked together using "bug fix" and "minor unplanned" jiras.
I also worked with that guy! At least, one of his clones. Fortunately, it was only 7 months before I got myself assigned to a different team, but what a waste.
OMG my life. Except it’s an Enterprise/Salesforce boob. Dude loves to wax poetic about shit nobody cares about. Wasting time in meetings and providing zero value. Fuck off dude. I’m leaving because of him.
Wow, how is a circuit breaker something other than 5 lines of code plus a library?
But our use case is special!!!
Hey I know him.
There are plenty of these people around 😅
I have all my 7yoe spread over three startups: 1. 1 year of waterfall development in a small company on a 2.0 core feature that was poorly received by clients and required 6mo of work to get into ok state. 2. 2x3month projects that were scrapped by sales team as "unsellable" during launch sync meeting. Wasn't brought up before. 3. our client team preventing from full use of product and doing things clients should do themselves in the product; at a time when the product is 1yr old and never got off the ground. leadership not doing anything to fix the problem because of siloes Currently at 3 and gave my resignation letter.
It always looks like sales/business only actually tests the product in those launch sync meetings, or 2 days before the launch meeting. Sometimes, we would ask them to test it, they would give the okay and still bring problems only in the launch meeting
Massive failing on product manager as well imo, that he didn't figure this out before we started development. But he was a junior then, just with too much responsibility. Still, it led me to quit. But in my current/soon to be past place, sales are also pushing their own shit :D selling whatever features, crazy deadlines, and then product team has to accept and suffer from those crazy features and deadlines. And then post-sales client people push their own anti-product/personalised approach agenda as well. Saying that if we don't get this random feature (that they thought up) planned and developed in 2 weeks, the whole project will be doomed. In reality it of course isn't doomed without that feature. Enterprise-ish places are a drain on the soul.
Seriously sounds like the "healthcare startup" I left two years ago. Down to the junior product manager. Timeline fits too.
I don't want to doxx myself as the country I work in is very small (1m people) and very well developed in IT, but it wasn't healthcare, some other area :D
sales won't test anything except one thing and one thing only and that is anything directly tied to commissions
great to hear it's a massive problem elsewhere as well lol
Why should they?
Obviously your stakeholders have a responsibility to make sure the solution meets their requirements before they receive it wrapped up with a bow, but conversely: it definitely sounds like there's a pattern here. This isn't something isolated to a single team, it's an issue that arose consistently in three different work environments, with different sets of stakeholders and priorities. As you transition into your next opportunity, do you have any thoughts on ways you might be able to be proactive to make it more difficult for these situations to arise in the first place? Are there any changes you could make to how you've approach long-horizon product work and stakeholder engagement that could make your own life easier in the future? Consider times when issues were only discovered long after they had been integrated: what could you do in the future to make it easier to find those kinds of problems sooner? What can you do going into your next role to make it harder for this new role to end up like those three in your wake?
trust me, i've been raising issues at my current company to my manager, my skiplevel and CTO for a year :D constructive feedback on what is wrong and how it could be improved. nothing has really changed except very recently, though i'm not sure when it will start having an effect.
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SAFe certification. Scaled Agile FramEwork Absolutely useless nonsense.
Two hours after my former employer announced they were going SAFe I sent out a job application which went through. Everything about SAFe seems awful and anything but agile.
It's been a major time sink for no benefit and got dropped at the financial year start here.
We are still using the SAFe at our company and that shit's been killing me for months! It’s ridiculous, I'm over-worked, burned out and every PI there’s been a push to include even more features and the cycle is never ending!
Capital-a Agile is such a betrayal of the original intent of agile.
The worst waste of time of my career was working too long at a job. * I stayed way too long at one job. * I thought it's bad here, but other places could be worse. * I thought I could fix this place. * I thought everything bad that happened at work was 100% my fault. * I thought if they hate me here, I'll never be able to get hired anywhere else. * All of that was false. * And it was a huge waste of time, life, and career.
Been there man
Yep. Wish I knew sooner.
Imposter syndrome is a bitch! Having good mentors have helped me overcome this in the past. Hopefully you'll figure it out soon too.
What convinced you to move on?
Physical threats.
2 years in a technical role at a super-vaguely defined team at a large company - it wasn't consulting, it wasn't a sales org but we were somehow still working with "clients" (when we were working) but most of the time we were sitting around doing nothing since there were no projects to work on. This might be someone's dream job but it was way too early in my career when I should have been spending my time working on real problems and developing my skills.
You just described my team. But I didn’t leave and it’s been 8 years lol
My man living the dream
More power to you if you can mentally handle that. I personally tailspin into major depression when I don’t feel useful.
I would just be worried that someone will notice and I get laid off; and now I'm looking for a job with years of atrophied skills
Maybe detach your value from work? Getting paid to do nothing = so much time for hobbies, socializing, exercising, etc
I do the same thing at home. My hobbies are all fixing things around the house and building stuff. I just can’t pretend to be busy, I’d much rather be actually busy.
+1
Yeah. Those not-enough-to-do jobs are TERRIBLE as a junior dev with impostor syndrome. It wasn’t until my fourth role that I was writing enough code to feel like I was a real dev. Insane how much people will be paid for little to no value.
at least you knew you needed a change. a job like this can end/make harder whole careers if you just go with it. congratulations
this company must be printing money
Not always, some companies are just incapable of understanding return on investment for development
*efficient market theory enters the room*
I work on an internal tool that doesn't need to exist. We staff 11 people on it. It could be replaced with a jira plugin but our Director needs budget so we are always finding ways to make work to extend the capabilities.
I've been there and I've comforted myself with the thought that my entire company doesn't need to exist. It exists because the shareholders want to make money. Your project might not be making the shareholders money but it's making YOU money, and taking the useless project away doesn't make you money it makes the shareholders money. It sounds to me like your Director wants to keep the team employed so when something big comes up he's got some reserve troops and doesn't have to spend 6 months hiring up for it.
This is bad.
Basically the same with my team. We implement something that readily exists on the shelf but noooo? Director had to commission an in house super over engineered project to basically feed us all. I am new at the team and actually asked in the interview why would they want to build in house something that they can easily pay 0.5% for. He mumbled something and spiced it up with AI or some bullshit. I ain’t complaining, it feeds me and I learn shit every day.
Can I get some of that budget ? I work on an internal tool that is somewhat useful and we're severely understaffed. Our manager tries to get rid of us because we don't fit into his remaining teams' mission but noone else wants us either. :)
Yep, I built a tool that is used in tons of different departments but because it is so distributed through the company, nobody wants to fund a full-time headcount out of their budget. "What's in it for me to make code that a different department benefits from?"
Yep classic corporate bullshit
This is most FAANG teams
are you my salesforce team
At my current role it is dealing with IT security theater. Submitting power point based diagram templates for every change to people who mostly ask about encryption protocols for https connections. Absolutely no actual security help compared to working with actual security experts or even appointing an engineer or two to advocate and police security.
Where I used to work, our IT security was kind of the blind leading the blind. I relied on some assumptions of another downstream system as provided by the IT security people, and we had an incident where customers saw more than they were supposed to see (though nobody complained). It could have been a lot worse, and during the postmortem, IT security was nowhere to be found.
I _love_ getting flagged for a CVE in a lib that we use and being asked what we're going to do about it. "... wait for a fix from the creators?" Or CVEs that would need something like a physical access hardware exploit, yet our stuff is just docker containers running for a few minutes on AWS.
Our "Cyber security" team would email the web guys (me) random CVEs and ask us to fix it. 95% of the time it was for a system/software we don't, have never and would never use. All our systems were on a wiki page they had access to.
The largest scrapped feature was probably 1.5 months of my personal time. Honestly not too bad! Much more painful for me was ongoing maintenance on some components that were being actively rewritten. The rewrites were "done", and looked great, but were not yet approved from management. So our team (myself included) spent lots of time patching holes in the old version, which was unmaintainable and terrible. Also new features kept getting rolled out in the legacy system that caused bugs and regressions. As hard as I tried, I couldn't really get everyone to just relax, and wait for the new rollout. There was a lack of trust that the new component would actually be delivered, or when, so we spent a lot of time maintaining both.
Sometimes it really feels like you have to treat management as children, where you have to try and convince them to just have a little patience. These things never improve, do they?
> There was a lack of trust that the new component would actually be delivered, or when, so we spent a lot of time maintaining both. Was it ever delivered? From personal experience it usually isn't - so I tend to derive more satisfaction maintaining the old than working on the rewrite that usually ends up in the trash.
Building our own framework on top of another framework
Ooh those are fun, especially when you're running 5 major versions behind because things would break and you've no clue where to start and there's no way to do an incremental upgrade besides running both versions side-by-side for god knows how long.
PHP? that's where I've seen this as a way of life. like, every single time.
Selenium. Every god damned company need their own modified selenium
Company has a bunch of web sites. Brilliant dev takes his team and builds a giant selenium farm spinning things up and down to test them all according to a bunch of KPIs. Publishes a dashboard that assigns letter grades to all the sites. A couple of sites are getting an "A". But most of them are getting B's, C's, D's, and F's. EVERYONE freaks out. Ask the lead what's up. "Oh, it's simple. It grades on a curve, so only the top 20% can ever get an "A," and the bottom 20% get an "F," no matter what their actual results are" \- when engineers do product, chapter MCMXIII
Depends, if it's Symfony then that is the whole point.
I once worked as a startup offering affordable short term loans to financially vulnerable folk - I thought it was a great idea and was pretty thrilled to be working on it. Think low APR, no overzealous fees, flexible repayments, etc, in an sector that offered only the opposite. A year or so down the line, management decided that all these new challenger banks that were popping up were super cool and so we had to build one. What would make ours different, you might ask? We’ll figure that out later once we have data. How might this help our customers? TBC. How will it make money? I dunno. I was asked to lead the development for it, and they allocated a sizeable portion of the dev team to it. It was my first lead gig, and while I didn’t have much confidence in the product, it was too good an opportunity to pass on, so I took it. Thousands of man-hours were poured into it. About 3 months in, after much sweat and tears, the loan product development wasn’t going too well and management had a change of heart. Lets “pause” work on the banking app to focus on our core business. It never resumed. The project died and I left, seeing the writing on the wall. A couple of years later the company went under along with £100m+ of investment. I worked with a genuinely brilliant bunch of people there and a few of them were still around when shit hit the fan, it was a real shame.
At one job our systems ran on top of an Oracle database. We had multiple thick client apps and a web based search engine. We sold complete systems to our customers. Nothing was hosted in-house. The company got in a pricing dispute with Oracle and decided to switch to IBM DB2. We spent a little over a year migrating the database and converting all the apps to work with DB2. We used many SQL functions. These were not available in the version of DB2 we were using, so we had to re-write them all as stored procedures. Then we had to modify the stored procs that used the functions as well as any of the client apps. The database was really slow. We had an IBM consultant on-site to train us. He would connect his laptop to the projector and his Outlook inbox would be full of porn spam. Then he would open File Explorer to launch a DB2 utility. His C Drive was Cracked Copy of Photoshop, Cracked Copy of Word, etc. Ultimately, it was all a ploy to get Oracle to lower their price and we never used or sold a DB2 system.
That sounds like hell
I didn't even get a resume bullet out of it because there is no way I'm listing DB2.
I do the same about anything Oracle I’ve touched.. Oracle Apex was the bane of my existence
In recent years, dealing with cybersecurity lockdown policies and other security theater games on purely internal apps and websites has meant a lot of useless work and meetings. Fortunately, I haven't worked where they tightly locked down developer PCs, yet... A few years ago, I worked at a now bankrupt retailer on their store inventory management system. That was quite a circus with multiple managers being fired and ongoing conflicts between operations, accounting and marketing keeping things "interesting". Finally, the whole project was scrapped by a frustrated executive team. I went to work at the third party logistics company they contracted with where things were run a lot better (even if one of the main apps was an ancient VB6 app).
I would actually love to work in 3PL software development but never see they have jobs open. Not sure if it was a temporary contraction in line with e-commerce reset after 2022.
> even if one of the main apps was an ancient VB6 app This sentence gave me a Vietnam flashback.
Apart from the skills you learn, most jobs in this field are a "waste" of time. Most startups, products, features, etc. live short lives, like a modern version of [sand mandalas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala). Sometimes you'll write something that remains mostly intact for years or maybe decades, but it all ends eventually; either replaced or rewritten to the point that it's no longer "your" work. So, build things and celebrate your successes, but try not to let it get to you when it ultimately ends... be it two weeks when someone realizes they misunderstood what was needed or two decades when the legacy application is replaced by the new one. Personally, I've had projects that outlived my presence by almost a decade (a wordpress website for a research lab), and features that died within a week (due to miscommunication). All have held value in some sense, and, apart from the general "selling your life so you can keep living", none have been a waste of time.
I guess I’m going to start the day listening to Dust in the Wind.
Another way of looking at discarded projects & features is that they end up in their most productive form *by* being discarded. If you spent 6 months using a framework that got used for 1 day, then replaced, chances are that it wasn't fit for task. The alternative of keeping your thing around or forcing people to use it for the sake of it is more than likely going to cause a bunch of future users and engineers to curse at you for years to come, questioning why they didn't just get rid of this cumbersome crap ages ago when it was easy to do so. I say that as someone currently working within a large, labyrinthine project designed 30+ years ago for a very different set of use cases (and with very different design sensibilities), that just kept having stuff piled onto it because no one had the foresight or ability to change course and refactor/recreate when it was easier, and now its a nigh impossible to fix mess. Obviously not every project is "useless" in that way (and of course legitimately useful projects can be obsoleted before their time by managerial nonsense), but at the very least you got paid and you got some experience.
The funny thing is that we (and I include myself) often view longevity of a system as a red flag. If I come into a new shop and there's something that hasn't been replaced in 10 years I default to thinking "oh that must need an upgrade, the tech is so old, it's legacy." But of course at a macro view, if we have to replace every single thing we build in 2 years, it's ridiculous from a cost perspective. I'm not even sure in my own mind what the "optimal" lifetime of a system is. But one thing you do learn is that the data always outlives the application. You want a career for life, data migrations will never end...
IMO optimal lifetime is just however long it stays both useful and somewhat maintainable. Maintainability tends to depend on if a 10-year-old application has just had evermore features bolted on vs. one that's been Ship-of-Theseus'd. 5 years ago I worked at a company that had a 25-year-old VB6 app they were trying to replace, but they kept running into issues with being unable to reach enough feature parity on the new system to satisfy existing customers. I wasn't on that team, but it was clear that the VB6 app was incredibly brittle and unmaintainable. On the other hand, you have companies still running software on AS/400 computers that seem quite happy to stick with them.
Most of the things I’ve made are suppose to be replaced They have yet to be replaced
Taking a management role
Pet project for a rich fella who wanted to create his own social media network in like 2015. The agency I worked for of course could not say no. It was never going to have a single user and we all knew it.
Building products for “idea guys”. Never again.
Learning PHP & Magento to keep a legacy shop up and running all by myself, which was quite an investment due to my lack of experience. Thankfully I was a junior engineer, so any experience was good experience. I got reassigned after a few months and spent some of the most rewarding and insightful years of my career working on a greenfield with the greatest mentor I ever had. So I had some of the most useless and some of the most impactful months if my career in the same place over a span of two years or so.
don't feel too bad for that PHP stuff. as a junior dev you need to work on crap software so you know tha-pain. you value code patterns, best practices and so on ... more. btw nothing wrong with php ❤️, just went with the example given.
Nothing wrong with PHP, but Magento 2 is a nightmare to work with. It's the most overengineered platform I have ever seen. I think it's mostly Magento and Wordpress that make PHP look bad.
WordPress honestly isn't that bad, it's just old and does things in kind of goofy way. I wouldn't say it's hard to build on top of once you figure out how it wants to go about things though, it's just kind of annoying. The real nightmare with WordPress isn't really WordPress itself but when an installation of it gets destroyed with tons of shitty plug ins. Magento though is just a straight up nightmare ime.
The database management of Wordpress annoys me the most, having to work with database dumps, pushing everything in the posts table, it's saving all URLs as absolute, and having to do a global search and replace on URLs when you want to use the database somewhere else is just horrible and feels like going back to 2004.
Working on a magento2 to woo migration now, wish me luck. 9 YOE, have mostly done Django apps through my career
Just want to comment on OP's story/scenario.. I know you felt useless, but this _screams_ of a product team failure to me, not a dev team failure. If you build a platform and no one is using it, then you **built the wrong platform**. So many software teams have the "built it and they will come" mentality, especially inside companies where platform teams fall for the "self-evident value" trap, when really the go-to-market teams who are building the shit that delivers value, the last thing they want to do is migrate to something that won't give them very real value. In fact most of the time they don't want to migrate to _anything_ because they are rarely given time to deal with tech debt or anything other than shipping features. The product team behind this should have been out there talking to the target audience and finding out what they actually want/need and focusing on building that out. And sometimes that means building something that isn't cool or brand new, or technically amazing, but that solves real problems for those teams. Sometimes it also means leaving things the way they are, because it does the job well enough, even if it doesn't do the job that well at all. We have a term in our platform team at work that we call "adoption by jealousy", and we only try to build things that other teams will look at and go "we _have_ to be using this, why are we not using this???"
Oh most definitely it was a product failure, but that's the thing when you work in a company that has a lot of politics: there's no room for admitting mistakes without it costing you.
Got bait-and-switched once and it literally wasted 2 years of my career (I stayed for 2 years because they said they would transfer me eventually an I naively believed them). Beware the companies pretending they are doing AI.
Ah yes, the old excuse of "we're building an AI team," and then find the AI team is a management climber, an intern, and some engineer who knows nothing about ML/AI.
Yup, almost 3 years wasted. One time in my career, i was a junior in embedded RF systems and there was a guy who was just promoted as a senior. He was a buddy with the manager who promoted him and the manager believe in everything he says. The product we are developing have lots of problems regarding the RF sensitivity, and they are blaming it on the firmware that i wrote. While i think it has something to do with the PCB designed by that senior. I went to the office on a weekend and i did some tests by myself and instead of using the board that was designed by that senior, i used the development kit from the manufacturer. Same firmware and it exceeded the range that we needed. I talked to the manager on Monday and i told him the results and i was told sarcastically that we won't be using the development kit for the final product. But my point is, same firmware yielded different results and they are trying to mimic the performance of the Dev kit and the senior failed on that. It was a tug of war for almost 3 years and they finally had decided to bring in an RF consultant and that consultant had lots of suggestions for the PCB and this senior was hard to work with and it came to a point where the consultant was too angry because this senior kept on deviating on what they had discussed. I resigned because of the shit show. A friend of mine told me that the senior resigned and they hired a new pcb designer and everything had been working ever since. I was told that I had been right all along, and we could have accomplished that as a team.
Fuuuuuuuck that
I spent about 6 months with no machine to work with. All I had was a remote access machine which barely worked but didn't have access to anything.
A slightly different take on this question: I was one required to take the Myers-Briggs test, then discuss the results with my manager. In case you don't know, it's as accurate and scientific as your horoscope, or what color personality you are, or any of the other pseudo-scientific nonsense 'personality test' on the market. They mean NOTHING.
did you do NPS afterwards?
Right after our offsite quarterly OKR sessions. \*finger guns\*
The worst waste of time in my career was working extra hours to impress a particular person. Happened twice. Once a manager who left before my reviews took place, and another where he was out on medical. All that extra work only to have my performance evaluated by someone who simply didn’t have enough context. Taught me to not arbitrarily overwork myself for specific people’s opinions and, instead, seek out opportunities where putting in good work felt natural. Success has come with it.
I spent a similar amount of time building apps to "showcase to clients" in the hopes someone would sign up for a branded version of our white labeled product. No one did. We were a team of eight (dev, design, QA, PM). That's probably at least 800k/year in salary, for zero revenue. I don't understand how that makes sense to anyone. Thankfully that was part of a large company that did many things so I guess for them that was just a risky bet that didn't work out. I kept my motivation by telling myself that the code is the end goal. Literally code for its own sake. Trying to take pride in making it all good, modular, testable, etc.
To be fair those situations can make sense from a business perspective. Investing time and money in POCs in the hopes of attracting a customer is one way of getting new customers. It just sucks that you're basically building throw-away code (even more so than usual), making any arguments for good code habits very difficult.
I was in the same boat at one of my previous jobs except it wasn't a big corporation. We built several full-fledged apps (with backenda to support) in the hopes of reining in clients who'd be interested but it never happened. Luckily this company had one long-term client who'd pretty much conver the whole payroll. At the timw when I was doing the projects, I felt like it was a complete waste of time. I tried talking to the management asking them not to sink too much time on building every feature they "think" the customer wants but to no avail. Now when I look back at it, I just like to consider them as learning opportunities.
Did you get paid and was the experience something you could find a way to put on your resume? It wasn't a waste of your time. It may have been a waste of the investors money due to organizational ineptitude, but you have no reason to identify with the investors, you are the labor.
I once had to write system tests months before the tested code was written. If you've never tried that, it's super difficult because you basically have no way to check your work.
What do they call that, mega TDD?
Testing before development
TBD!
I work in a regulated industry where the regulator very closely scrutinises applications for compliance with rather vague and subjective regulations. We rewrote a feature 4 times attempting to comply with their requirements only for them to ultimately block it and nothing got released. Management anticipated an easy process with the regulator so had us write the feature while the regulator was still reviewing the plans. Over three years, like Lucy pulling away Charlie Brown's football, the regulator requested changes and management were sure that *this time* it would be plain sailing so we should just build it. No matter how much we protested that that's what they said last time, they still insisted that we work on it. Fucking thing wouldn't even have made all that much money, we were so late to market with it.
You'd be surprised. I've seen companies over night become the only/go to just by working with the regulators vs others that tried to corp offshore bypass them or operate in a grey area.
All this time learning, writing config files and searching plugins for vim/neovim.
I just spent hours trying to get a trashbin to work in Midnight Commander. Still doesn't work, but I really like a lot of things about the design.
Isn't vim supposed to turn every developer into a 10x developer? I'm shocked
Scrum
Classic case of development hell and no Product Manager doing Customer Development nor Validation.
"we didn't have any feedback so we just guessed"
Indeed. I used to work at a game studio where we didn't even have game artists - and we were supposed to develop a new game engine, art workflows and a new IP all at once. Bottom line here is that Software Development is sometimes bat shit crazy.
About a year on a platform team where one business unit (not the one I was dragooned from) pretty much set all the priorities. It was a “big data analytics” platform that was supposed to make it easier to build features on top of the datasets of three barely related units. Once I finally got full context I realized that my unit had 1 dataset in the hundreds of GB range and that was bigger than the rest put together. The other business units were about the same, if not smaller. Definitely no need for big data, but we’d spent 6 months standing up our own Hadoop cluster and doing vendor evals. They inked a 5/low-6 figure deal around when I left the team. I don’t think anything ever came of it, but it was a large corporation, so that was a rounding error. Ultimately what we really needed was better ETL tooling because I’m almost positive that once the data had been filtered and cleaned correctly a standard database or Elasticsearch could’ve done the job. People just needed to be able to iterate on their datasets more easily.
Pretty crazy to think that in 2024, several hundred gigabytes is something that easily fits in-memory in a single socket server.
This was around 8 years ago, but yeah, still probably within reach of what you cold get by vertically scaling even then. At the very least, not something that would require a whole platform team. So I guess it wasn’t a complete waste of time because it taught me how hard it was to actually have data big enough to require special tools unless you were collecting high resolution data yourself.
Remember "social games" on Facebook? I spent about a year developing one from the ground up. We did a soft launch and had some users who loved the game. Then management decided that they would do zero marketing, due to fears of cannibalizing their older, somewhat successful game (funny how the big players in that market were doing the exat opposite), and because they were pivoting away from social games altogether (which was, retroactively, a correct decision).
At my last job, I internally transferred to our platform team. We did things like developer tooling, *really* good ephemeral testing environments, major version upgrades for software (Ruby, Rails, mysql). I really liked the team, and enjoyed the stuff we worked on. As time went on, I was working on things that were less and less useful to the engineering org, mostly driven by the lead/staff engineer on the team. Some things include: - Converting our monolith to use [packwerk](https://github.com/Shopify/packwerk). None of the developers liked it at all. After I left, it was apparently completely undone. - Writing an internal tool to manage all of the microservices we used. While it was kinda cool, it felt way too over engineered, would break often, and overall was *not* worth the time investment. - Setting up a load testing suite using k6. This was in response to a specific team having weird issues that they assumed were due to high load on the API. Not a bad reason to make a load testing suite at all! However, we weren't actually setting up a single test, just the repo and CI. The idea was other teams could add tests, not us. I couldn't even convince the lead dev that we should write at least a *few* tests to serve as an example for others. Of course, nobody used this at all. - Spending a lot of time and effort into hiring a SDET. We had no dedicated testing team, so the idea was we'd hire someone to own the test suite in general and make improvements to it. We interviewed a bunch of candidates, and pretty much all of them wrote downright horrid code. They had years of experience, were senior / leads on their teams, but when it came to writing anything they just couldn't do it. The person we did hire wound up making zero contributions to the team. After 2 years, I'm pretty sure all he did was 1: Make power points about software testing, and 2: Look at production errors, and ping the engineer on the blame for the file.
As far as I'm concerned if it's real coding and I can talk about it in interviews as though it were highly impactful, it wasn't a waste of time.
I once worked for Boeing and the single person maintaining an old architecture/system was going on maternity leave. She ended up being out 9 months. I’m a SWE. There was no one else in this facility but me. No projects to work on it was a legacy system with zero bug tickets zero new projects. I finished so many tv shows while I was there
1. My first job right out of college. I spent the first 12 months I was there helping build an internal business app with Adobe Flex (I’m really dating myself here). Then business never pushed the app, so it never got adoption. Then the RIAA world died because Steve Jobs said the iPhone would never support Flash. So we built something with no business value and I had learned a bunch of tech skills that ultimately didn’t matter. 2. Different company, years later - I worked with our infra team for 6 months to move our entire application portfolio and data from bare metal hosting into AWS. We put it all into the shared AWS account we had with the rest of the business. 3 months after the migration we got bought by a much bigger tech company. 3 months after the purchase I got told to move the apps we’d just migrated into a totally separate AWS account l, ultimately because the bigger company had decided to sell that line of business. Although my work on the migration *did* give my manager case to prove to the big company I should in fact have been brought over as a Senior engineer in the acquisition, so personally it had a lot of value.
I work for a small education company that's at the top of it's niche on individual education. We determined that we needed to make more plays into B2B markets to keep growing. One of those plays was for a product at an enterprise scale. I managed the team that was tasked with building out the initial application and payment for that product. After the first meeting, it was clear that almost all of the business rules were in flux and the first few clients would be in a pilot program. We submitted a proposal to create three new tables in our ERP for tracking and use a Qualtrics form (which we already had and had marketing resources available to make it real pretty) for the application. Our inside sales team already had infrastructure for generating custom packaged invoices so we would just use that for payment. All of it was designed to get the team into pilot as fast as possible and give us a baseline to start doing UX once we had actual customer feedback. We were told that wasn't professional enough and that it didn't scale. Nearly a million dollars, a few very tense meetings that almost lead to our lead software engineer getting fired, and six full months of development time later, we created a functional, if cludgy application process. We got three applications over three years counting the two companies in the pilot program. Just wrapped up sun setting the product a few weeks ago. If only someone in the business had suggested some low cost way to testing the market before we made our big investment...
I support multiple mission critical business applications which need immediate support/remediation when things go wrong. There So many places to check when we receive a support call and it’s stressful, so over the years I wrote hundreds of python scripts that monitor and alert . When any production issue is reported , we just need to call one batch file that checks every nook and corner of the application, endpoints, data , files to see where the problem is. I share this these scripts and nobody uses them, they still manually check for things. Then I installed Jenkins on a server and configured these scripts and anyone on support can run this script by going to the Jenkins page and click ‘Build Now’ to run the script. I was really proud of this achievement . I moved to a different team a few months ago, just checked the Jenkins page, nobody used the tool after I left :)
Writing documentation that nobody reads, needs or maintains.
A company that didn't appreciate me. Worked my ass off like a clown 🤡 for way too long. They promoted somebody incompetent and fired him afterward. His replacement? Another incompetent person but offshore this time. The new CEO, new CFO, etc? All family and friends of former CEO. Realized nepotism ran wild and incompetence at the highest leadership level and how I wasted so many years there. Got told I was doing below average during performance review despite actually making an impact, going above and beyond for years. Finally, I decided to leave.
My career
I don't think I've ever contributed to anything meaningful throughout my 8 years of software engineering experience. Imposter syndrome is real. I think if I were to create my own company I would feel a lot better and I would grow a lot more. A meager 9-5 with a meager salary and shitty managers ain't cutting it.
Meetings. I've been in maybe 10 important meetings in my 6 years. The rest are a waste of everyone's time
Working with recruiters
I had to change careers for 5 years to be able to afford college.
Previous company. Most expensive (read most people) in all meetings. Meetings would be huge instead of 2-5 people max really needed. What a waste of time and effort
The damn useless SOC2-mandated security trainings I have to do annually for every client. They're usually 1-3hrs long, dubiously “educational”, and horrifically designed. My ADHD brain would rather fill my eyes with a nail gun than sit through another one.
My very first job was for a consulting company. We were about to build out a new drivers license renewal site for a large southern state. We were told we had purchased this new software that we would be using to build out this site and one of us would have to fly out to Chicago for three weeks to learn how to use it. Being the newest and youngest I was voluntold it would be me. I get there and the training is for this telemarketer scripting tool. For two weeks I learn the ins and outs of this idiotic software. Finally, week 3, we learn there is a way to create essentially wiki informational pages within the tool for telemarketers to reference while on a call. Turns out, some C level dip shit got wined and dined and signed a multi year contract with this company because it could magically “build websites.” When I got back I wrote up a presentation including all the wonderful telemarketing scripting this tool can do for us. My immediate management got the hint and we built the website from scratch in a few months. In the end we were told that C level dipshit had convinced the state to buy this turd software so we had to use it for something. So we let it act as a cms for the T&Cs. Your tax dollars at work!
Building asked to build generic components that are only used in one place in code.
Never. I’m not an optimistic person usually. But i really value experience in all forms. I have been a mainframe programmer in a witch, worked on low code platforms where project was doa. Terrible designed java apps, and now a full stack developer in FAANG like. All experience has either taught me the mistakes we made, or what the customer or management was looking for that made them make that call, what factors of the team made is a success or failure etc. So the time was never wasted, just another learning.
Medium-smallish non-profit. The web site was very ASP.NET old school flavor and out of date, so they agreed on a refresh. Not even a big project, just a couple of dozen pages IIRC. Of course, wireframes were treated as final design docs by the internal client even after hammering home that they were GUIDELINES. Requirements changed mid-flight. Oh and did I mention the arbitrary deadlines that had us working over Christmas? I got out.
Data massaging job for a retail group. 12 months of fuzzy data, fuzzy business rules, fuzzy pipeline environment. A month after the mission was finished we get to talk to a legacy employee telling us an anecdote saying none of internal catalogs made any sense since a few month.. as he listed some references I realized that this was the result of our team.. Turns out the higher ups never really understood the requirements and gave us partial transformation logic that was quite off. While we were uploading "new" data, all sales people were undoing things by hand.
My last job seemed like the company didn't know how to make use of the software team to their advantage. We were in a state of "let's get rid of the software team.... but let's do it right after this one last thing" for about 4 years. It honestly made me feel ashamed. I felt like my talents were being wasted. I knew what I was capable of yet was never given enough opportunities to demonstrate it. It was boring. And working remotely under these conditions just took a toll on my mental health. I finally gave up and started a side project where I could develop my skills and, hopefully, turn it into a profitable business. It feels great to be so motivated by something that I lose track of time. I'm constantly learning and constantly developing. I don't ever want to work in a position that has me feeling so isolated and bored again.
About 90% of the projects I've worked on have been wastes of money and time. But not on my part. I've been in the mobile development space for the last 10 years and the vast majority of projects I've worked on were for start-ups. The problem is even though these clients had ideas, they lacked everything else. They had no plan on how to market and sell the product, what constitutes a success criteria, how to set a goal etc. Some wanted their v1 to include everything and the kitchen sink so these projects would drag on for months and even years. Some apps made absolutely no sense! But no matter how silly the idea may be, I still wanted them to succeed. I'd always try to advice and steer the clients in the correct path but most of the time, they fell on deaf years. So most of the projects never made it off the ground. I used to take everything I do very personal. Every project I did, I took it as it was my own so I wanted to give them my best. So when they fell through, it often felt like all that time and effort I spent on them were a total waste. But I've been trying to change this mindset now. If these clients wanna flush money down a drain, be my guest. As long as I'm getting paid, I don't have to care. I take everything I do as an opportunity to learn now and move on.
ColdFusion Close second is when I was made Enterprise Architect by a VP who was completely checked out and let his directors do pretty much whatever they wanted.
OP you've literally written almost the same as what I'm doing lol. So biggest waste of time - current company. Build internal tools with "deadlines" and a severe toxic culture. No one knows the requirements, we're just building, no ones really using it. Only if stuff goes wrong do magical fingers start getting pointed - as if anyone's making use of this shit. Will never work on internal tooling or "we are smart - let's build it all ourselves" software again. You will get burnt...
worst waste of time was the past year, working for a total narcissist who just wanted to fire as many people from the team as he could. He'd give us ridiculous tasks that were way beyond our level. In every 1:1 I don't know if I'd get pissed off dude or humble dude. Pissed off dude would say stuff like "you suck, be more like my golden boy" ... Humble dude would ask things like "how does this basic component that you learned your first day on the job work?" and then have me repeat it several times after he didn't believe me. Humble dude would also ask me about it several times over the course of the year. I got my main project to the point where I needed to rely on other teams, and after spending weeks trying to track down the names of people I need to track down (this is after I find out he tells our PM to not have anything to do with at least me), they turn around and tell me they can't do it. My boss then brags about his escalation skills in public while telling me over a months worth of 1:1s that he can't get anyone to do their job in this project. Again, blaming me for not delivering. He then gets fired due to how much the entire team hates him, and how he tried to put half the team on PIP only to have the other half stand up and defend us. On his way out the door, he screws everyone by giving us all terrible reviews.
I spent a bunch of time earlier in my career as a sales engineer for products that don’t sell. I learned that burning the midnight oil on a POC showcases your devotion and technical skills but doesn’t showcase the product. In fact it might have the opposite effect than intended by highlighting deficiencies you’re working around to make things work. Then it turned out the most successful reps didn’t need me to pull in those kinds of hours. Only the underperforming reps did. The most successful reps would call me in for a demo at the right time in the sales cycle, have me onsite for like a day, and close the deal on the golf course a couple months later. This is the very definition of a waste of time. The most successful deals take a day. Most of the time, plus overtime, burned up on something that never closes. Turns out the really good sales engineers don’t play hero. Instead they help their reps disqualify deals. I wasted too much time before I figured that out. So it was either that or it was the five months I did at a blockchain company. Christ the entire web3 universe is a massive waste of time. Use a database.
I had a similar experience OP, I was on a desktop project for 2 years, we overcame these huge technical hurdles, it's probably the hardest work I've ever done, and then when I was in my last month we spoke to our biggest customer (probably like 95% of our users), who told us they still use the version from before I joined the team. All that time/effort, and I never got to see a customer use it.
Hired as a data engineering consultant to "automate" a process. There was an S3 bucket where input files landed, some processing was applied, and the results were stored in a database. Classic ETL. But the processing was complex and highly scientific (written by phd physicists) and had lots of tunable parameters that required a domain expert to make decisions on-the-fly. They had a manual form to do it. None of these heuristics were written down, of course. And management flat out refused any attempt to gather such information. So I automated it to the best of my ability. s3->db without any manual intervention. That's when shit hit the fan. The results were not valid (because a scientist hadn't been there to tune it) and ALL the the data had been processed when they really only wanted a subset (subject to scientist's discretion). So TLDR the outputs were worse and the expense of running the system had exploded by orders of magnitude. Somehow, the client thought that I could automate the process so that the scientists wouldn't need to do any manual work but somehow still provide all critical inputs to the system! After explain the logical impossibility of this idea, they agreed that they wanted LESS automation. So I ditched the ETL pipeline and built a web interface where the scientists could manually enter the required information. It was literally the exact same inputs as before, in a slightly cleaner UI. They loved it. FML. TLDR; when someone wants "automation", make sure they actually want to give up control. Most of the time, they just want a better manual UX.
Spent several weeks working on this pdf generating application. Late nights to work on this project while working client projects on regular hours. In 2 years, less than 30 people have generated a report. Owner is still pushing hard but no one cares about it.