18 month project is winding down. I suspect it will have 1 use in the next 4 years we are supporting it.
The tool is basically a copy of the S3 browser, only shittier. The license for the S3 browser is only 20 bucks btw.
We built a whole quality assistance software to prevent human error in manufacturing. After political non-sense, the project got essentially cancelled when it just started to become useful.
We did ship it for one use-case, though. That use-case doesn’t monitor human labor. Nope, they have robots that were supposed to be more reliable than humans and now we’re quality-checking those robots.
How is that the use-case where we’re most needed?
The German government has decided that starting on October 1st of this year, they don’t want energy providers who want to call up another energy provider to just google the other company and use that number. They want an entire new system of message exchange for the sake of transmitting data like a company’s address and phone number directly to all it’s market buddies.
I’m part of the team who had to build that shit within the last 4 months or so. It’s a neat project and everyone gained knowledge in AWS cloud stuff, but realistically, every one of our customers will use the system exactly once (as required by the government) and then never again.
Germans and over engineered solutions, most iconic duo!
Not in IT, unfortunately. I work a lot in public projects and the underlying problem is pretty much always politics, not technology.
One project is very simple, in theory. You authorize yourself with BundID, type in some data, these are used to query one agency, you add some more data and then it’s sent to another agency. In a sane world, that would mean 5 parties involved. However, we are currently at 10, just for one of the 16 states. Hardly any of that is a technical necessity, it’s just political will and incompetence.
Years ago I joined a startup as a junior developer to work on a patented security application with SSL certificates and stuff. They had been working on it for 5 years, 10 engineers and 2 guys with PhDs, it was serious business. The thing was a prototype but it was fun to work with them. I was porting their app on Mac OS X too because the founders were sure that it would also be a success on a Mac.
Then one day I bought a HTC Desire to try this Android thing since I already knew Java. After a few tutorials, I realized that I could clone their whole app in 100 lines of code thanks to the Android API in less than a week, but it would be better, safer, and portable. I knew we were doomed. They closed the company a few months after because no one wanted their application.
My company had kind of the opposite case. They had a fully functioning system, but the C suites of the client absolutely had to have a native iOS monitoring app, so they could monitor everything on their iPhones, while all their workers had Androids.
So they rebuilt everything for iOS, added all the useless features they wanted, got paid … and then had like two downloads.
I once worked on an interface for wifi network selection. The marketing people thought that the scan went too fast and that people would believe in consequence that it wasn’t powerful enough. So they asked me to add an artificial delay (multiple seconds) before showing the results.
Instead I’d probably take multiple measurements some hundred milliseconds apart and do a basic statistical analysis (average as “main result”, but also lowest percentile, highest percentile and median). That way I don’t feel dirty for tricking the customer.
It wasn’t the most fun part of the project, and it was targeted at non-moving home devices so a more powerful wifi logic wasn’t really needed. In the rare scenario where the customer didn’t see its wifi network, he/she could just refresh the list.
I basically just added an ugly timer and moved on more important things.
non-moving home devices
There still is a use case - not that common in America but very common in (not only Europe’s) metropolitan areas:
If the devices are located in a dense urban residential area (say Berlin Gropiusstadt in the 11th of 20 floors) you have a lot of neighbors with wifi, and - at least on 2.5GHz - roughly a third of their wifis will use the same or overlapping frequency range. In the evening, when everyone and her dog streams the newest Season of Bridgerton those will send relatively short bursts for buffering the next five-ish(?) minutes.
This of course interferes with your measurement if you happen to measure at exactly the same time, so having multiple samples instead and providing an aggregated value is - for this scenario - more helpful.
OTOH: it all depends on the use case of those appliances - if you don’t have competitive gamers who wonder why they sometimes lag in your valued customer list, that’s a non issue (and if they actual were competitive gamers, they should use an ethernet/fiber cable instead of wifi, obviously).
And you probably did not get that much time allocated to add the delay, so going with another variant could get you in trouble if it’s taking too long.
A design professor actually proposed this idea to us. Make the user feel how the computer is working, so they can appreciate the result more.
Take the same approach with tickets: Finish one in 10 minutes? You just get a new one. Finish the same one in 2 days, and claim “Pff, that was a tough one, but I did it!” - Makes the Product Owner think the Developer is working, and appreciates the result way more
Not of they ask Jim about it and Jim stabs you in the back and says nah this should take an hour max dunno what Ron is doing.
Then sneak in a test case that fails if the commit is made by Ron and ask Ron to implement it in an hour, all tests green. 😈
Eh that’s grounds for dismissal or at least a reprimand.
You always talk the shit, you never write it down.
I’d never do that - while I have the creativity, I totally lack the criminal energy. And I despise practical jokes.
Had a client that couldn’t understand a small dataset of data. They needed “something interactive to filter and sort the data for a human to review.” We suggested putting it into an excel spreadsheet, and did it for them. Customer didn’t know how to use excel so we had to create a knock-off excel table GUI that had buttons labeled “filter and sort”.
some people seem to have money they don’t know what to do with smh
Since I despise Excel (mostly for the auto converting feature) I appreciate that alternative.
OTOH I am all but a typical user, and while I occasionally use LibreOffice Calc I prefer basic statistics and charts for SQL-tables and CSV-like data in LINQPad (since it’s the tool I use every day, i.e. to spike out ideas before using a real IDE).
When covid started, the country I live in set some temporary rules to relive some financial stress from the people. A lot of companies in our sector had to quickly abide by those rules (maybe 3 month time to prepare the new processes etc.)
Our company already had a lot of customers who would need a solution to maybe automate that.
And our project manager (and a potential customer with him) decided to not only use a native solution we could program directly into the system, but throw rpa on top.
This not only made the solution harder to program, it also made it slower (it could only run at night instead of each case instantly), more error prone, more programmers were needed (I could program a simple solution alone, with rpa we needed 3 people plus an extra tester) and also the solution was more expensive, because of paid licenses for the rpa software.
Suffice to say, we did not sell a single copy not even to the customer who wanted it. But we “shipped” it in a sense.
