What's the dumbest thing you've shipped?
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.
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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.
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.
Thanks for the information on those situations, I didn't know.
It was actually mostly targeted to (multiple) European countries. Yet I would probably just re-do it the same way if I re-did that, I prefer the simplicity (of the code) of having the user manually refresh the list for such niche issues over a complex code others would have to maintain. Moreover, the wifi just has to be configured once, at first install.
When I read that, I'm happy to not rely on tickets system / scrum or to ever get into trouble because I'm doing the right things. I would probably quit a job like that, it sounds like hell to be considered that way.
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.