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Comment by lloydatkinson | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the author is majorly suffering with analysis paralysis, something that’s quite relatable. Still, I can’t say I’ve suffered it to the extent I’d rather be stuck debugging spaghetti projects.

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ever completed a project to find out 6+ months later that it was never used, for reasons?

working on an existing mess with outstanding complaints at least better guarantees that it is a valued mess. some environments, that’s not about comfort, it is about survival.

There are enough devs who don't give a shit if the project is actually used... Or useful

yes, but not always on the project.

My dad spent the first 12 years of his career working on the Advanced Gun System for the DDG1000 destroyer program. Never got used.

I can understand why he has such a disdain for government waste.

The entire DDG1000 program was a boondoggle. An active-duty friend of mine who is well-connected in naval strategy circles keeps repeating that the Navy won’t pull its head out of its ass until a few large hulls end up at the bottom of the South China Sea.

Most of what we do is pretty useless anyway. Does the world really need another online shop, another way to watch movies online, another social network?

I think projects which get cancelled or never released are great. I get to do the fun parts - the design/architecture and solving the hard implementation problems - but not the endless of hours of tweaking, bug fixing, dealing with the inevitable pre-release business pivot which turns the software from a beautiful solution to Problem A into a horrible kludge for Problem B. And I still get paid!

These are best projects. You get to do the fun part and don't need to support the product. And you get paid.

Sure, I had a project canceled after I completed it. Not a single user ever saw it. I still got paid the same and I never had to maintain that code or fix any bugs, and I got to keep the knowledge I learned. Probably not great for career development to have this happen repeatedly but it was pretty great the one time it happened to me.

A quarter of my output over the last 12 years has ended up this way. But most of those projects were built as MVPs to prove a concept by installing a demo system in situ and we learned a ton from it. And some of those projects I finished for 1/100 the cost of our competitors POC systems in the same market.

A lot of what makes my job enjoyable or not is in whether there’s a business case for what I’m doing. If some VP is asking me to fiddle around with something that’s never going anywhere I’ll be miserable. But if I’m fiddling around to build something that drives more revenue or makes people happy with our product then I’m there.

One of the more fun projects of the last ten years was a project designed to fail.

We had an in-house data centre, and we needed more capacity at certain times of the year. Justification was needed for more dedicated capacity in the face of cloud infrastructure.

So we built a system to use spot pricing to spin up extra instances, securely, on AWS, google cloud or azure. This could meet bursts of demand at busy times.

At the end of the exercise we had a working system and managed to prove it was better value and more resilient for the organisation to increase on-premises capacity.

Fun project though!

This is a problem that afflicts perfectionists; they want to consider all the options so they can pick the best one, and a blank canvas has nothing but options.

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