Most demotivating thing as a programmer: knowing your project will never be used

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.

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 first “paid” programming project (I was paid in a used 20MB harddrive, which was equivalent to quite a bit of money for me at the time):

Automate a horse-race betting “system” that it was blatantly obvious to me even at the time, at 14 or so, was total bullshit and would just lose him money. I told the guy who hired me as much. He still wanted it, and I figured since I’d warned him it was utter bunk it was his problem.

I used to sell windows shareware, a series of apps that composed music and loops etc. I got really sick of finding cracked versions of my apps online, usually a day or two after I’d released something. So I wrote and released an app called “Magic Text Box” which consisted of just a single form with one text box on it. Less than a day later, a cracked version of it showed up.

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?

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

A client paid us for a bespoke platform for managing invoice payments. Probably 20 man years sunk into it, they wanted to sell it to their customers but no one wanted it. They’ve just given up trying and axed it.

Had a team of 10 working nights and weekends for a month because someone in sales sold a contract for an integration with a 3rd party that didn’t exist yet. In the years I was there after that project shipped, only 1 person even looked at the feature, one time. It never actually got used

An RFC that essentially boiled down to saying, in excruciating detail, that I am qualified for the job I was hired for and that I can be trusted not to break the website.

Stupidly bad project we were rushed relentlessly on, because - stop me if you’ve heard this one before - some dimwit promised months’ worth of work “in a couple weeks… by an intern”.

I made it generally known that this whole thing had a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting done on time with a 4-5-man team, they did not deign to take that opinion on board. In fact, they pretty much twisted our arm into shipping some barely working bullshit, causing them to have to do a buttload of manual correction instead. I hope they’re having fun with that. :>

I work in a different industry but one time we had a guy who shipped his radio, and his vape, separate times.

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.

An ad hoc sorting system for a grid of tiles on an enterprise app

Instead of sorting across row wise, it sorted columnar. So it was

A E I M
B F J N
C G K O
D H L P

Instead of

A B C D
E F G H
I J K L
M N O P

This was a requirement from the CEO. Since we used this project (dogfooding) we stuck a secret search box/command palette in, which you could hit . and then type the name of the thing you wanted and click it

I lost count.