Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrLeap | Hacker News Reader

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Years ago, when I was adapting field manuals into Unity Games -- I got asked to create some training for a piece of field kit that relied heavily on a windows mobile device (very early windows mobile, that had a registry -- could run some win32 apps, had a noticeable delay of like 350ms between every input and it reacting...)

I had that new-job-gotta-impress energy, so went _hard_ at this project. I added so many tiny details to make it _exactly like the windows mobile device_. I had simulated battery indicators, signal that was calculated by ray-crawling to the nearest in game "tower" and attenuating based on the materials it encountered along the way (why?!) -- every menu, function, submenu that I had access to I implemented. The power button worked, the restart button would do the windows mobile boot animation. No stone unturned.

When I finished it, I assume 6 people saw it, but they never said anything to me about it. That was probably my first adulthood jolt of ennui. Ah memories.

I worked for the same field-manual-into-Unity employer for a few years, first doing DoDAF architectures on a contract on Ft Huachuca, switching to the serious games division for a small number of weeks before I politely quit in frustration.

We spent years building what amounted to UML diagrams of existing Army units. Great effort went into them. Coordination with active-duty officers, with GS civilian stakeholders, training from certified DoDAF-training instructors; we had TS-SCI clearances.

Then the resulting products went into a database somewhere, and nobody ever looked at them.

I imagine that sort of thing is rife in the government contracting world, but it seems like that particular firm has a real knack for finding truly futile things to get paid for.

It was a rough situation at times. I really took advantage of how self directed things were in the beginning. It was basically a masters program in whatever technology I chose to learn. Some people used the time to watch netflix. I wrote a 3d engine for android in almost entirely openGL ES2.0. After that, Unity was what I chose.

I did find a few things I could do that made an impact. One project I did on a lark even resulted in a little recognition.

I overheard an instructor complaining about an onerous, all hands on deck eternal data wrangling task. Seemed like an easy thing to automate. For bureaucracy dodging reasons, I wrote it in actionscript3. All it did was eat files and spit out xslx files.

Turns out it wiped out XX% of the manual labor every instructor on post had to do in a single button press.

A GS megaboss said it was going to save the government millions of dollars a year. Was a little disappointed I never personally got a challenge coin for it. My boss did :)

I'm grateful for the numbers though, I could leave that job confident I saved the tax payer more than I cost.

Hopefully some of the things I'm working on for my current employer will get some visibility in the outside world. Software is ephemera, but I'd like to make a token effort to be remembered.

Awesome mindset and perspective. Wish I could say the same about my co-workers. I'd work with you in a heartbeat... This intrinsic motivation is highly contagious to me in my experience and I wish I could be around it more often.

I had an intern that whipped up a new set of training walk through slides and used MS paint to draw color coded boxes and arrows on screenshots to teach you how to use it. It was like a day of work for him. People with C in their job title saw that PowerPoint. It was a really damn good training presentation.

I call it Schrodinger's work. Maybe it matters to someone, maybe it doesn't. You don't know until you do it. The stuff you spend a month on winds up being worthless and the stuff that you spend an hour on winds up being used everywhere. There's no telling which is which. Such is life creating support documentation for systems that live and die by things outside your team's control.

Honestly, this kind of thing is still super valuable. It's really nice when you go digging up some old resource and have it be there when it's needed, and it's amazing when it was done right.

What sucks is if it was half-assed when you finally do find it. Or worse, it gets forgotten about and the work gets duplicated every time someone needs that info.

This must have been a huge project, because I had a friend in Charlottesville, Virginia who got hired in 2008 to do almost the same for the Navy, "what amounted to UML diagrams of existing Navy units." They paid him $125 an hour and he took the work because it was the middle of the 2008 recession, but it was boring work. A year later they asked him to do more, but he turned it down.

It's basically rife in any organisation with more than ~2K+ total employees, regardless of private or public sector. The only that changes is the scope of how much funds & talent get wasted.

Hey I worked at a really dirty,ah-hem, company a few years back after leaving the army. I appreciate the details you put into your work.

Thank you! :)

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