Usually you have to spend years working away and trying to guess why everything you're told to do makes the software worse.

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?

This is the sort of attitude that ensures you don't win!

A lot of these "certain delay for 'correct' response" rat feeder types of mechanics. Even when you know "the hit" is pointless or a waste, still heavily compelling anyways.

Cigarettes have a similar experience if you smoke too long. Days of "I don't 'actually' enjoy this anymore", yet my body still demands something that makes me vaguely nauseated now. Except, per the original comment, it is still the "suspense for a reward" that no longer exists.

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.

Previous user took a very huge risk. I've seen similar stuff happen, you can get sued (along whoever told you, but you need proof) just for the sake of making an example in front of the rest of the company.

Also, still it is not illegal. Just that the shareholders need to sue him to matter at all.

That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty. If they weren't acting to their employer's benefit, then whose? Employee fiduciary duty cases tend to be more about things like embezzling or competing with your own company while you're still working there.

An example of Fox getting shut down for trying to claim that sexual harassment was a breach of fiduciary duty: https://www.barnespc.com/news-articles/limitations-on-the-sc...

There has to be proof about that. If everything was verbal how do you prove it?

There's no way around the fact that sabotaging your company is illegal and a breach of contract.

Incentives and adoption goals for internal tools are weird at large corps. Intentional suckage is just another tool to drive migration

Heaps of people online have stories about how Microsoft tricked them into upgrading Windows.

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.

Where do you draw the line?

Did a lot of great work with good people there too. Projects that lasted for nearly a decade.