On: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have ...

[enraged_camel]

I worked in consulting for over a decade, and... yeah. When people migrate from one system to another, they try to make the new system work exactly the way the original system does, especially if the original system is homegrown. That lack of flexibility tends to be responsible for more than half the cost (and time span) of the migration.

[datadrivenangel → enraged_camel]

"We hate everything about our system, get us a new one"

"We want the new system to work exactly like our old one"

It's probably not worth the money...

[drekipus → datadrivenangel]

I haven't pieced those together but of course they go hand in hand.

I had one guy want me to recreate Microsoft word, worts and all, because his current Word wasn't doing it for him

[nilamo → drekipus]

Or refusing to use anything except Office 2003 because newer versions are too different...

[gentschev → enraged_camel]

There's also the related failure mode of deciding you're going to fix all your other system problems as part of the migration, bloating the scope and creating too much complexity. Just do the necessary stuff, migrate, and then go back and fix the nice to haves.