Ask HN: What is the worst job you've had in tech and why? - kilroy123
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cmollis
After graduating in 1990, I was hired by an oil company to work on their
internal expert systems group (yes the whole AI thing happened in the early
90s too.. except without all the linear algebra which would have made it
useful). After 6 months, they canned the project and for the next 2 years I
worked in desktop support. I did all kinds of interesting things like install
lotus 123, install graphics boards, load terminate-stay-resident drivers for
memory extenders..(if you know what those are, you’re close to collecting
social security) and... oh yeah, if you couldn’t print a document, I was your
man. I felt like everything I learned in school was a complete waste of time.

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Insanity
Software engineer for a company that had made the work for clients extremely
customizable, to the point that for most of the day I'd just be going through
"GUI Wizards" to deploy a new instance for a new client.

Almost every tweak was just a tweak in a settings file or with the UI, and
almost no new code was written.

Kudos to the devs building this system initially, but horribly boring for the
devs that came after them.

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crazystar
Being a software development manager in a non-software development
company...in healthcare. The pride with which people claim that they are not a
“technical” person while handling patient data is mind boggling.

