Experienced Devs: Describe Complete Failures You Have Encountered...
Posted by ITContractorsUnion@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 50 comments
It certainly happens. Maybe bad managers, maybe incompetent devs, maybe just lame company.
But, nonetheless, please describe any situation where somebody came up with a "big idea", only to have it fly like an Alligator.
Since this is an international community, please give some context as to country.
I Look forward to the stories...
Much appreciated.
effectivescarequotes@reddit
I worked for a government contractor support a small government agency. They had a jekyll website that got essentially zero traffic. Basically everytime we improved the bot filter on our analytics, the traffic dropped by an order of magnitude. They paid an obscene amount of money for hosting, but eventually switched to AWS and dropped their costs to something like $20 a month.
At somepoint they decided that they wanted Drupal. The issue was their lead security officer was an idiot. This was a public website, displaying public data that no one cared about. He applied the same security posture normally reserved for highly sensitive internal systems. Hosting the site was going to cost a half million dollars a year.
But the dumbest requirement was that no unpublished data could exist outside our firewall, which is were the site lived. We spent two years and an additional $500k on another consulting firm trying to figure out how to keep two separate Drupal instances in sync. Eventually that security guy moved on. His replacement took one look at the requirement, said it was stupid and waived it.
By then the administration had changed to one that did not support the organization's mission, so they stopped updating website beyond the required regulatory stuff, so even though they were ready to launch they just killed the project.
WeiGuy@reddit
Was the information something that nobody cared about, but was sensitive tho if looked at?
effectivescarequotes@reddit
No one cared.
johntellsall@reddit
To be honest that is a success. Project with onerous requirement is built, but instead of it continuing it's killed. No more good money after bad. Success!
WeiGuy@reddit
Didn't get canned yet, but just a matter of time.
Big contracting company gets big project for maritime logistics system. Extremely complex system that has to enforce business rules from collective agreement from unions. "Super star" dev starts working there first and he's no CTO. He made all the wrong moves that fucked up the project and everyone still sees him as a genius programmer, but he's just a dude who spent too long in front of a screen to cram results.
The project is millions over budget. The system is so bloated and needlessly complicated that all developers are experts in one thing and anyone leaving causes a massive disruption in the project.
I suspect with AI, it's just a matter of time because they can the contractor. They'll lose their golden goose and go under.
johntellsall@reddit
Some micro service projects are "coding to pad out the resume" :) So many things would be simpler where each microservice is just a library and the Step Function is just a main program.
WeiGuy@reddit
That's exactly what it was. They were so excited to tell me about their brand new modern micro service architecture and that it's a programmer's paradise. It was THE worst time I've had in my career. Got 0 new features released because everyone was stuck in fixing old bugs. I hate tech fetishist programmers.
josemayonaise_@reddit
Myself
TrainingDragonfruit1@reddit
3 US startups, literally same scenario. After first one it was like watching the movie with the rest 2. Scenario goes like this. Founders emply one rockstar developer who is working overtime, weekends and becomes toxic, some more, some less. Founders lose control over application, rockstar developer becomes critical resource as nobody knows anymore how big portion of app works. Rockstar developer starts to lose temper on meetings and wants everything done his way, threatening he will leave company. At that point founders start to look to sell company to avoid bankruptcy. They sell conpany to bigger company which is unaware of internal issues because everything is presented to them in best picture possible. Bigger company shuts down application and layoff people. Welcome to my TED Talk.
psyyduck@reddit
Sounds like everyone got paid. This post is asking about failures.
TrainingDragonfruit1@reddit
If company and their product sinking down because founders stupidly lost control over app development is not a failure, I don't know what is 😄
AnnoyedVelociraptor@reddit
Seems like we worked together.
TrainingDragonfruit1@reddit
Given the number of upvotes, it seems a lot of us worked in "same" company.
AnnoyedVelociraptor@reddit
So should we form a union?
Federal-Garbage-8629@reddit
What does incompetence dev actually mean?
Turbulent_Idea7328@reddit
A big company hires an external executive as a director to lead a new initiative.
The guy is basically retired after a successful run with his previous company.
The company convinces him to postpone his retirement with the power of money.
They guy does not do much, and retires after a year with an extra million bucks.
Developers get the blame for not delivering anything useful in one year.
Some ambitious senior dev gets to lead the project now but for 1/5 the salary. The pressure is mounting.
A couple months later the project is scrapped because apparently we didn't need it anymore.
Executives get bigger bonuses for cancelling the project which saved money.
Devs get smaller bonuses because they didn't deliver anything useful.
WeiGuy@reddit
God that was a sad read.
psyyduck@reddit
It’s the ciiircle of life.
CatalonianBookseller@reddit
That's not a failure, that's a win allaround
Key-Half1655@reddit
I work with a guy that has abandoned all brain function and will just post links to ChatGPT conversations as counter points in discussions among senior devs. He is also a senior. Ive just stopped responding.
schmidtssss@reddit
Are the links completely wrong?
psyyduck@reddit
If I wanted to verify bot text, I would just go talk to the bot. Nothing wrong with bots, I use them all the time, but the human should have some value add.
karmaboy20@reddit
prob tired of spending all day arguing with OP and wants his time beck
schmidtssss@reddit
I guess my point was if what he’s sending/saying is wrong that’s fine but if it’s right…..
Gooeyy@reddit
Even in cases where it’s “right” enough, it’s often tragically verbose, which wastes everyone else’s time and energy. Effective communication remains one of the most important skills anyone can have.
karmaboy20@reddit
yea op spazzing out bc he wants the other dev to type every character by hand 😆😆 like how boomers prefer going to the bank in person. nor keeping up with technology
Key-Half1655@reddit
I started off responding as normal but after a while GPT fatigue is real especially when it hasn't enough context on a problem and is confidently incorrect. Instead of spending time discussing the task at hand, I was pointing out flaws in the GPT response. At the end I just though fuck this, if he cant be bothered responding in person I cant be bothered replying and correcting mistakes in person. Work continues, this guy's input is almost entirely ignored in decision making.
ratttertintattertins@reddit
The polite thing to do is to write your own bot that responds and then just let the agents slug it out while you get on with some work.
codewario@reddit
Key-Half1655@reddit
Nailed it
ADDSquirell69@reddit
Cognitive Surrender
gyroda@reddit
Had a guy who clearly copy/pasted chatgpt responses. A lovely 10 point list absolutely none of which applied to our use case.
Another time, we had a meeting and I got so angry I had to take a walk afterwards because he was so fucking obtuse. Then our PO, who had to miss the meeting, asked for a summary/take away points while I was out so this guy gave his summary. The PO, I found out the next day, had also gotten so angry he had to take a walk.
Lovely guy, apparently, but I can't abide that level of uselessness if they're going to insist on being heard/involved. An active detriment to the team.
funbike@reddit
Realize that every failure is a growing opportunity. Learn from it. Tbh, I mistrust applicants that can't describe terrible failures and how they dealt with them.
But to answer your question, "the big rewrite". A complete from-scratch rewrite of a huge monolith is almost always a mistake.
JollyJoker3@reddit
Rewrites are tried by people who don't understand refactoring
OfficeSpankingSlave@reddit
What if the code is a massive concurrency mess written by a junior dev and used by tons of clients?
Thats the situation in found myself in and couldn't refactor my way out of it with the massive release constraints.
Gooeyy@reddit
If it was written by a junior, it’s probably not the type of monolith the “don’t rewrite it” applies to.
Busy-Ad1968@reddit
I assigned an employee to optimize one solution that works in real time. It was necessary to increase the time rate of multi-threaded data processing.
As a result, when he completed the task, it turned out that the solution began to work slower by 20% and in single-threaded mode. Despite the fact that all the requirements for the task were described in advance. In his defense, he said that "multi-threaded data processing is too complicated" and "But now we have a proper single-threaded architecture."
It later turned out that for some reason he couldn't figure out how to implement multi-threaded work, as if he was "thinking in single-threaded mode."
He also considered the degradation of algorithm parameters to be absolutely normal due to the “correct architecture.” He had to leave.
The grand idea was to have "correct architecture" at the expense of everything else
CatalonianBookseller@reddit
Which language was it?
kaizenkaos@reddit
There have been many devs that I've worked with that just don't show up. People value reliability and a good teammate.
Just don't overdo it because then you'll get a bunch of work dumped on you. Make sure you draw the line and keep your teammates accountable.
bigtdaddy@reddit
Rebranding after already rebranding
mattgen88@reddit
Dev created his own clone of major framework. Boss asked whether or not we should use it. Everyone said best to just use the supported framework with a community. Boss said we use new thing. Spent significant amount of time building and supporting new framework instead of building products. Company collapses after losing contracts and failing to build anything that sets them apart. Does a long slow death.
DrShocker@reddit
I used some AI to explore making a clone of one of our dependencies to understand it better, but I only went far enough to see the shape better not advocate actually using it
mattgen88@reddit
Yeah this was pre AI. Guy decided he could do reactJS better. It got some major usage. Popped up in my current job with devs having issues with it... I had to sit there and laugh otherwise I'd cry. Don't make it your company's job to maintain something that someone else is already doing. You'll always be behind them and you have business to do that doesn't include supporting adopters.
DrShocker@reddit
yeah, there's a balance when it's the core to the business logic because controlling it is sometimes genuinely better than having a dependency for feature development, but that's unlikely to be true for a frontend thing like react.
dabup@reddit
That's what my company is doing 😜
Kid rebuilding the UI frameworks said he likes doing UI, and "knows a thing or two because he's seen a thing or two"
He's only worked at start-ups before this 😫
karmaboy20@reddit
Component library or making his own react?
Live-Purposefully@reddit
That is something else 😬
ClideLennon@reddit
I worked for a huge billion dollar private equity B2B retail website, a brand name you would all know. We put Google Adsense ads on our search pages. These are business customers, not normal consumers. We all through it was a horrible idea, but the powers that be saw it as just a free money sitting there for us to take.
After four days we have enough complains from our large corporate customers we completely removed them from the site. Weeks and weeks of dev time wasted.
HotSingleKarens@reddit
I have seen a few storefronts serve ads in addition to their products. Each time I promptly left and found another supplier lol. I always assumed it was a last gasp effort.
-Mister-Popo-@reddit
Had a team hire a new manager and he reported to only 2 team meetings in a 3 month span. We had daily meetings. Didn't meet with clients. Didn't meet with the team.
Job was fully remote and none of us had much of a relationship with our clients as everything flowed through the previous manager. He just didn't do his job in any way for like 3 months and no one knew. He finally got fired, but I made up my mind to leave that company once I realized what went down.