Useless feature I've built?

Too many to mention. Here's #25.

Modified an existing "Are you sure..?" dialog pop-up (Yes/No buttons) to Yes/No/Cancel. Why? Managers claimed users were "accidentally" clicking 'Yes' when they should have clicked 'No' and causing all kinds of chaos, costing the company money, etc. Managers believed giving the user two chances instead of one would make it easier to avoid the problems they caused.

The meeting:
Me: "Users can click 'No', hit the 'Esc' key, or click the close 'X' button on the window, how will an extra button make it more foolproof?"
Mgr1: "It just will. Andy accidentally deleted inventory and when I asked him if an extra button would have saved them a days worth of re-counts, he said yes."
Mgr2: "Barb accidentally credited a customer $1,500. She promised me she clicked 'No', but the system credited the account anyway. An extra button would have saved us thousands of dollars!"
Me: "Um...these sound like training issues, not an extra button issue."
MyMgr: "PaperTrail, how hard is it to add an extra button?"
Dev1: "Oh yea, adding buttons is easy."
Dev2: "I can do it 5 minutes"
Dev3: "We'll save the company thousands and thousands of dollars!"
<lots of head-knodding and smiles>
MyMgr: "That settles it. PaperTrail, add the extra button!"

Users still screwed things up, but at least they couldn't blame it on not having an extra button.

long time ago....
Feature request: We want an android backup solution in Our app!
UI guy has already developed it, you just need to see if his solution is solid!
Ok then - lets look at the UI: Nice progress bars, that turn into green checkmarks. Looks good.
Now lets look at the code: ... Ok. loading some files into memory.... and... dafuq? does not write to a file?

Backup to RAM. With no restore. 🤦‍♂️.

All of them are useless.
It’s just a matter of time.

C++ application running on Linux. If customer makes a mistake, I log CustomerIsDumb to kernel message buffer.

Most useless feature:

Once we had to create a Learning Manager System to a small university. One of the (useful) features was a "file system" to people upload, organize and share documents (like a Google Drive prototype). This was the "student portfolio".

However, we had to create a page to act as a "cover" to it, that should allow the student to change the background, add exactly 2 images, and up to 9 "post-its". The image shows the notebook of our client while he was thanking us praising it as the greatest innovation of the decade.

The post-its was kinda nice, but what's the point of those images??

Anyway... On the same meeting of that picture the client asked us to include a "canvas" on that same page, so people could draw whatever they want. The words used was "just like [MS] Paint".

We postponed it, hoping he would forget about it, but on the end of the project he was still asking about it.

I found a lib that did the job and integrated with the project, but I also included a long comment for the next devs saying that I'm sorry they would have to support such thing 😅

The client loved but we never knew anyone that really used that Paint

it wasn't really useless but i spent months of my internship making a software that was shelved because "it was taking too long to be made". half of my year in the trash

An entire slick customer facing statistics dashboard... in a product that was discontinued a week after the dashboard was finished.

My entire job, where I was switching padding of buttons on an internal product.

Most useless feature: an extension that did the exact same thing as an opensource extension so that the company could hide the code and not include licenses (???)

ps.: they obviously used open source frameworks and libraries

In 2020, I was working for a company that started selling at-home covid tests online. Marketing wanted us to add a survey for this product. They said this was required by the government…but we didn’t have to retain any of the answers…🤨.

Most useless feature?

Any this business seems to think is the next great way to make their lives easier - by adding 500 more steps into an already complex series of cowboy processes.

I love and hate my job some days 🤦‍♂️

Forget most useless feature, an entire, year long product. Me (at the time very junior) and a principle engineer, wasted a year bundling our product as a plugin in a third party app. 3 years later, we'd sold 2 licences. It was a buggy pile of hell.

"Useless feature you built"

Even Yoda's giving me sh*t!

The customer wanted a calendar view that somehow contained data about fucking everything.

Ended up looking like a bunch of trash icons on a calendar

a "landing page", that was just any and all features of the application forced into one huge, unbearably slow, indeniably confusing page.

which took months of work. which i said beforehand "nobody will use it". which now, through the magic of user tracking, is proven to be used by nobody.

Made custom app for company for certain kinds of inspections. Was requested to make a license key for the app that is used internally. This was in case they wanted to franchise the business.

I made zero effort for the code to even protect against a weak attack vector. Like some shitty ass base64 or some shit like that. Any casual could crack it.

Years went by and was not talked about ever again. I took the shitty code I wrote for this out of the app. I can put it back, but guaranteed they will never ask again.

An email Signature.

migrated everything to elastic search, shitty learning curve and apparently shittier performance. now i dream of going back

We had made an api which had endpoints for each different domain model, so /user, /company, the usual. Beyond being restful they all had basic filtering and pagination.

We also had an endpoint to return an entity from any set based on guid for when you needed to attach the related entity to notifications and logging and such.

We received a bug report on how you couldn't use filtering or pagination on this endpoint, and after weeks of asking what they need it for we just had to implement it.

You can imagine how non-trivial it is to "just" filter across different datasets, but we eventually got it working so now you can get a user via /user/123 or /entity?type=user&id=123. They only use it for one type and id at the time.

Debbuging options that no customer uses since it makes the logs unreadable.

Formatted the logs and in 3 Years Not one customer used the feature or asked for it.

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An automatic tool (like smartgit) for our internal use. Not one uses it, instead they still complain about git

That I did.

DRM/licensing scheme

To be fair it was mostly because they never sold that software to a single client... But it was also all written in JavaScript

Would've probably been better off mailing the owning company to let them know one of their software users' usage for a lawsuit on backpay or something. Idk I didn't make the rules. They also messed up the specs for how modular the app needed to be so I had to rewrite the whole thing in 6 months, but this time I took the opportunity to do unit tests so that was nice...

Do Maya temp files ever work? Legit lost all my work after lunch 😭