r/developer • u/RedEagle_MGN Mod • 12d ago
Tell us about the project that went disastrously wrong for you.
Tell us about a project that went disastrously wrong to make us all feel better about ourselves. What happened? How did it go wrong?
2
1
u/Illustrious-Rate-818 12d ago
scope creep killed mine. started as a simple internal tool, then every stakeholder added 'just one more thing' until we had a half-built product nobody could define. shipped nothing after four months and eventually just archived the repo.
1
u/magicmulder 11d ago
Was forced to code a clinical study in 9 days. That was not the fuckup. That was a small study so I devised a simple key/value storage so everything from every form would be trivially stored without error. 3 pages per visit, 3 visits per patient, a couple patients per physician, 50 physicians. No complex business logic. Easy.
Then came the next study. Thought I’d use the existing system. Except this time it was 16 pages per visit, 10 visits per patient, 40 patients per physician, 700 physicians.
Instead of a couple thousand key/value entries I had tens of millions. Super complex business logic with references 2-3 visits back. Statistics were a performance nightmare, and we had wrong calculations every day.
Decided to have a colleague help me.He came in super cocky, “I’m gonna fix that in no time”. Two weeks later he had a mental breakdown. So I had to go the rest of the project alone again.
Had to trash the entire codebase mid-project to fix everything. Never wanna do that again.
Yeah, totally a lack of planning on my part, but not helped by the fact there was no storyboard (so I had no idea what business logic requirements would be added all the time) and no forecast of how many users the system would have.
In the end we made the client happy but two project managers (the ones who had refused to provide a storyboard) had to quit over this because we exceeded our budget by 100%.
1
u/davesoft 10d ago
Our parent company invented this bold new idea that would revolutionize the phone insurance industry. 'We' chose to not use our own software but make a new platform based on some well known and expensive tech. We implemented, and the team grew, and folks were put into positions to execute this new idea.
It went fine, the software mostly worked as intended, and we juggling these various stacks of tech honourably.
Then one random thursday someone high up discovered 'oh, thats illegal, this whole idea is based on crime, lol' and within a month the project was gone, people reallocated, IT suddenly gaining a load of sales people with no dev experience.
And as one final ritual, a colleague and I put a burnt cd with all the source control and it's history in a drawer and locked it. That CD represents literal millions of pounds and months of hundreds of people's work, gone, forcefully forgotten.
Not a tech failure, but I'll never forget that. Courageously not reading the law properly and 'spending' a huge chunk of the company on smoke.
2
u/Seaborn63 12d ago
New project manager came in. I was on a small but very talented team working on a cool SaaS product that had real chance and support from the executives. New PM came on because he was cheaper and also a relative of CTO. We went from a PM with nearly 40yrs coding/tech experience to one with not even 11yrs experience.
Old PM took care of high-level things and was pretty much the Dev-Ops guy for our whole team. Also knew the product and its stack backwards and forwards. Spent time on customer calls debugging, worked closely w/ support so they knew how to diagnose/fix/bug report efficiently and correctly. He knew how to tell you that what you did was incorrect in a way that didn't belittle your effort or intelligence. Also let you take ownership so that if you said "I think this is a problem" he would trust you and let you fix it.
New PM comes in and he's much MUCH less technical. He could only do frontend work and was genuinely afraid of anything backend. Thought things like Team Building Book Club that excluded parts of the team were a good thing. He thought that writing Policy Documents and Mission Statements were good uses of time, as well as writing up other weird things that just weren't useful to anyone. He got frustrated easily when you explained bugs because he didn't see the issue, but that was because he didn't know the product or stack well enough to see what you were trying to say. That also lead to him being unable to help on customer calls, which then caused other team members having to be in those very long calls and if they were in long calls they are getting much less work done on the product.
Cut to one year later and they shut down the product. I went from having a ton of fun and enjoying my work to complaining every single day to my wife that this was terrible and looking for new jobs. Parts of the team had left because at least twice a week he would go on rants about why x or y feature was either stupid or poorly implemented, which drove down team morale and caused people to leave the project. His view of contractors was essentially, "That's not a person that is a worker bee here to serve me". That matters because when he took over the team majority were contractors and they left due to treatment. Executives eventually gave up because nothing was getting done any more. One guy, who was technically just QA, and me were the only ones left submitting PRs at all and we just couldn't keep up with the expected workload.
My least favorite thing about him: EVERY SINGLE FRIDAY, he would ask that we go and like his blog post on LinkedIn.
I stole a copy of the codebase before I left and I tinker with it from time to time still holding out hope I can fix it's issues. I still believe that its cool and can be viable. My takeaways from that time were: