I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make it suck intentionally.
Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird.
EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
We had an internal tool that was written as a quick hack by a rogue developer but then became crucial for our operations. It was starting to show some rough edges and some performance limitations, so a big project was planned to replace it, run by two fancy new hires who demanded teams of underling developers and ridiculously inflated titles before they would tackle the project. It quickly became clear that this project would not bear fruit anytime soon, so my boss asked me on the down-low to produce an unofficial stopgap replacement for the parts of the old system that weren't scaling well. However, it could never threaten to be a full replacement, because then I'd be stepping on the toes of our expensive diva hires.
Long story short, last time I heard, both the original hack and my partial replacement were still in use ten years after I left. The big project ran for almost two years without replicating a single feature of the original hack. Right up to the last, the fancy guys produced an impressive series of complaints and excuses that basically said that they were doing everything right but doing things right didn't work because the problem and the context were wrong.
Different but similar. I once wrote a trivial lotto number selector app, at the request of some colleagues. It just emitted a few unique random numbers. Silly but why not.
They hated it.
I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number. They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)
That's not a useless project! It's a silly piece of code, but it gave joy to people, so I would say much more useful than most stories in this thread.
Back in the nineties my dad had the notion that if you make the computer select numbers at random many times, and you run statistics on the results you gain some "legitimacy" to these selections. So he asked me to write a "lotto number selector program", but it needed to run for a few hours and select many numbers and then output the ones that were selected the most or some such. Maybe it was more sophisticated, but I can't really remember the details. I guess I could just add a delay instead of actually selecting the numbers, but I wouldn't lie to my dad :)
It was super silly, but like you said, why not, I was a teen/tween and I didn't mind playing around with silly software.
He actually used it and actually filled out the lotto numbers based on it. No, we never won the millions :)
Also - I just visited a casino in Spokane, WA for the first time ever. Isn't that what all the machines there are doing? A random number emitter thingy with random delays, animation, music and flashing lights?
Your dad's thinking wasn't wrong, but you should've used the same PRNG as the machine that generates the official lotto numbers. Of course you still probably won't win though :P
This is the same psychology in play when the lotto balls pop from the hopper or loot boxes open or slot machine wheels turn. A few seconds of suspense and fanfare for the reward is more satisfying.
Had thoughts on this the other day, about going to the office after the weekend always feeling bad, and waiting for the weekend always being the main thought during work. Yet, the weekend? Not actually that great. Feels totally artificial. Like work is not fun by definition.
A lot of these "certain delay for 'correct' response" rat feeder types of mechanics. Even when you know "the hit" is pointless or a waste, still heavily compelling anyways.
Cigarettes have a similar experience if you smoke too long. Days of "I don't 'actually' enjoy this anymore", yet my body still demands something that makes me vaguely nauseated now. Except, per the original comment, it is still the "suspense for a reward" that no longer exists.
I wrote a similar little app for the office lotto syndicate, way, way back. The older colleagues didn't trust it, and preferred coming up with their own 'random' numbers.
I still don't really know what there isn't to trust about generating random numbers for the lottery.
There may have been very good reasons to sunset the internal tool, and underhanded as this was it may have made a necessary process a lot less painful that it might otherwise have been.
Did you meet the coworkers who were complaining at the coffee brewer or sth like that, and overheard anything they said about it? If so, must have been an odd feeling, and hard to not smile and say something
It was an internal tool and the VP was the head of IT. Everything still worked, it was just painful to use. He could have pulled the plug on it at any time.
Breaking fiduciary duty would be the first that comes to my mind.
Previous user took a very huge risk. I've seen similar stuff happen, you can get sued (along whoever told you, but you need proof) just for the sake of making an example in front of the rest of the company.
That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty. If they weren't acting to their employer's benefit, then whose? Employee fiduciary duty cases tend to be more about things like embezzling or competing with your own company while you're still working there.
> That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty.
There has to be proof about that. If everything was verbal how do you prove it?
There's no way around the fact that sabotaging your company is illegal and a breach of contract.
Fiduciary duty is a particular legal concept about the responsibility one party has to another, and only applies in specific, defined circumstances. A random developer doesn't have a fiduciary duty to anyone, and he wasn't taking any risk.
Even if it were an external tool, I fail to understand how there would be a legal problem. Companies use all sorts of shenanigans to encourage users to migrate. Immoral? Sure, but software crossed that bridge a long time ago.
Heaps of people online have stories about how Microsoft tricked them into upgrading Windows.
Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird.
EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.