Ask HN: What is the worst job you've had in tech and why?

After graduating in 1990, I was hired by an oil company to work on their internal expert systems group (yes the whole AI thing happened in the early 90s too.. except without all the linear algebra which would have made it useful). After 6 months, they canned the project and for the next 2 years I worked in desktop support. I did all kinds of interesting things like install lotus 123, install graphics boards, load terminate-stay-resident drivers for memory extenders..(if you know what those are, you’re close to collecting social security) and... oh yeah, if you couldn’t print a document, I was your man. I felt like everything I learned in school was a complete waste of time.

Software engineer for a company that had made the work for clients extremely customizable, to the point that for most of the day I'd just be going through "GUI Wizards" to deploy a new instance for a new client.

Almost every tweak was just a tweak in a settings file or with the UI, and almost no new code was written.

Kudos to the devs building this system initially, but horribly boring for the devs that came after them.

Being a software development manager in a non-software development company...in healthcare. The pride with which people claim that they are not a “technical” person while handling patient data is mind boggling.