Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird.
EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
Incentives and adoption goals for internal tools are weird at large corps. Intentional suckage is just another tool to drive migration
They hated it.
I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number. They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)
Back in the nineties my dad had the notion that if you make the computer select numbers at random many times, and you run statistics on the results you gain some "legitimacy" to these selections. So he asked me to write a "lotto number selector program", but it needed to run for a few hours and select many numbers and then output the ones that were selected the most or some such. Maybe it was more sophisticated, but I can't really remember the details. I guess I could just add a delay instead of actually selecting the numbers, but I wouldn't lie to my dad :)
It was super silly, but like you said, why not, I was a teen/tween and I didn't mind playing around with silly software.
He actually used it and actually filled out the lotto numbers based on it. No, we never won the millions :)
Also - I just visited a casino in Spokane, WA for the first time ever. Isn't that what all the machines there are doing? A random number emitter thingy with random delays, animation, music and flashing lights?
I still don't really know what there isn't to trust about generating random numbers for the lottery.
frankly it sounds kind of fun, but i'm sure it was not in reality.
Where do you draw the line?
Did a lot of great work with good people there too. Projects that lasted for nearly a decade.
Long story short, last time I heard, both the original hack and my partial replacement were still in use ten years after I left. The big project ran for almost two years without replicating a single feature of the original hack. Right up to the last, the fancy guys produced an impressive series of complaints and excuses that basically said that they were doing everything right but doing things right didn't work because the problem and the context were wrong.
Usually you have to spend years working away and trying to guess why everything you're told to do makes the software worse.
