Ask HN: What is your most frustrating experience as a developer?

Having a software architect assigned to the team who is not smart enough for the task but is trusted by management for all his design decisions because he and the management come from the same prestegious research institute. The guy was called in to redesign a central repository component but did not even take care to investigate the existing implementation and came up with a design that was clearly inferrior and had less functionality. Still he was trusted for his designs over and over again.

People above me making decisions that don't make sense.

This can be a business process. Maybe it makes more sense use a simpler business process for mundane systems, like fee collection, than to spend tons of money building out a complicated system with lots of edge cases. Good technical systems need a solid underlying business system.

This can also be project or technical leadership. For example, why would you commingle business content and system data I'm the same field? And then if someone changed that field and broke your system and it doesn't comply to json standards, but they refuse the roll back this cosmetic change... that was so frustrating. It felt like a complete waste of time. Work smarter, not harder. More like work stupidly and be political.

Missing and outdated documentation. For an iOS/macOS app at the moment I'm looking into how to modify an AVFoundation video copy (multiple splits and deletions of segments) with Swift. The framework grew up with Objective-C, and one of the docs outright shows Objective-C code while Swift is selected: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avmut.... Conceptual guidance is hard to find, and the Apple documentation archive's link for "AVFoundation Programming Guide" is broken.

Working on a big months long project with a lot of pressure to finish on time, and then the project is scrapped shortly after completion. It is hard to avoid, because it is usually caused by insufficient information in the beginning, but is still very frustrating.

Happened twice to me now: weak product team and product definition. Engineering optimistically forges ahead and ultimately gets flogged for not delivering results. Long work hours, micromanaging, and unpleasant work culture. First time experiencing it was a learning lesson early in my career. Second time I recognized red flags but had other reasons to keep the job. Ended up just as painful as I expected.

Working with Spring after a previous role using Http4k. I went from having everything be incredibly explicit and easy to understand, to magic everywhere. Many of the out of the box things work, but when you need something even slightly different that hasn't been accounted for, it is incredibly frustrating to find out how to resolve it.

Red tapes created by non-doers. They have no skin in the game, so they don't care about effects of their decisions on doers. In my org, they decide that everyone should use certain component. Sure it might be better component but they never actually used it, they just read about it, maybe vendor bought them a few expensive dinners. Now developers have to implement it. They come up with deadlines based on what vendor said. And devs have to reprioritize their projects, meet their deadlines while also working on features that customers or product managers want.

The worst is when two different non-doers come up with conflicting requirements and refuse to revise.

Arbitrary precision arithmetic