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Comment by eternalny1 | Hacker News Reader

I had something similar (but opposite) happen.

We hired a remote engineer to write a program to export to excel. He claimed it was done and the Excel "output" arrived every morning.

We asked him to submit his code for review, and after stalling, he produced some extremely obfuscated C++ code that turned out to do absolutely nothing.

He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports.

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>He was staying up all night entering data manually into Excel to generate the final reports.

He trained a neural network to solve the problem :D

Kinda tricky to scale that kind of network ;)

There are a lot of humans.

> There are a lot of humans.

Unfortunately, each has to be trained separately.

That said, the fact that producing additional untrained neural networks is often done recreationally by unskilled labor has to be factored into the unit economics.

Same thing here, but not for lack of competence. I was working on a project for a data logging system. A customer requested a special daily report feature for one of their projects. The team lead took the feature and that was that. A year later he took some vacation that would take him away from cell service and he had to level with me. The feature was implemented by him logging in as close to 9 pm as possible and sending an email. There were a lot of tricky cases and he thought the project would only run a few months.

Or paying someone to do it?

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