A former employer had a client who had us re-write the same project 5 times. We kept each project repo backed up, because we were able to re-use pieces when the next re-write rolled around. Eventually they scrapped the project. The client printed money and wiped their ass with it like it was nothing. A lot of stress went into it for nothing. The project itself was a horror story. Maybe someday I'll write a blog about it.
Then there's the one where someone high up wouldn't pay ten grand for a license, so he paid a senior dev to recreate the same feature set. Took this dev over a year, so over $100k+ for a amateur (by comparison) offshoot that is maybe as reliable? Instead of just buying a license for 10 grand (I am shifting the amounts on purpose, it may have been higher ;).
Then there was the project where they hired a ton of Jr devs except like four (30+ devs) and charged senior rates for all of them. They refused to hire actual seniors, questionable hiring practices all around. The front-end folks were doing hacks that give me nightmares, because they had to (proprietary front-end framework). When the app hit the app store I saw all the negative reviews for it and was not surprised.
Then there was the project I was what I call full-stack developer plus. It involved a web front-end (I worked on the back-end, and the front-end) to a daemon (I worked on this as well) and a debian package, as well as some external APIs. It also involved mDNS / Avahi. The idea was we would install this package on a OS we customized, then we would know we could run tests on this OS. I touched every major piece of that project, and was holding the weight of the other two developers because one was a junior, the other was some weird data science guy who wrote some of the worst code we ever saw.
Edit: I forgot one key piece, I also wrote shell scripts to automate installing and provisioning this OS on Virtual Box instances, which would also check the network for this VM to be online and then install my Debian package.
It also had noVNC (a web based VNC client) so we could remotely see these systems with ease.
We had this thing running like a train by the time I was at my peak with the project, and one QA guy said one thing wasn't working, and the manager said we'll stop using it until its fixed. That was the death of that project. I also kind of left the company after all the burn out of basically carrying too much weight. It was one of my worst projects I worked on because of all the weight in my shoulders, but it was also one of the most fascinating ones.
Then there are more recent examples I dare not utter since it was within the last year at my former employer (I'm looking for work HN ;).
A former employer had a client who had us re-write the same project 5 times. We kept each project repo backed up, because we were able to re-use pieces when the next re-write rolled around. Eventually they scrapped the project. The client printed money and wiped their ass with it like it was nothing. A lot of stress went into it for nothing. The project itself was a horror story. Maybe someday I'll write a blog about it.
Then there's the one where someone high up wouldn't pay ten grand for a license, so he paid a senior dev to recreate the same feature set. Took this dev over a year, so over $100k+ for a amateur (by comparison) offshoot that is maybe as reliable? Instead of just buying a license for 10 grand (I am shifting the amounts on purpose, it may have been higher ;).
Then there was the project where they hired a ton of Jr devs except like four (30+ devs) and charged senior rates for all of them. They refused to hire actual seniors, questionable hiring practices all around. The front-end folks were doing hacks that give me nightmares, because they had to (proprietary front-end framework). When the app hit the app store I saw all the negative reviews for it and was not surprised.
Then there was the project I was what I call full-stack developer plus. It involved a web front-end (I worked on the back-end, and the front-end) to a daemon (I worked on this as well) and a debian package, as well as some external APIs. It also involved mDNS / Avahi. The idea was we would install this package on a OS we customized, then we would know we could run tests on this OS. I touched every major piece of that project, and was holding the weight of the other two developers because one was a junior, the other was some weird data science guy who wrote some of the worst code we ever saw.
Edit: I forgot one key piece, I also wrote shell scripts to automate installing and provisioning this OS on Virtual Box instances, which would also check the network for this VM to be online and then install my Debian package.
It also had noVNC (a web based VNC client) so we could remotely see these systems with ease.
We had this thing running like a train by the time I was at my peak with the project, and one QA guy said one thing wasn't working, and the manager said we'll stop using it until its fixed. That was the death of that project. I also kind of left the company after all the burn out of basically carrying too much weight. It was one of my worst projects I worked on because of all the weight in my shoulders, but it was also one of the most fascinating ones.
Then there are more recent examples I dare not utter since it was within the last year at my former employer (I'm looking for work HN ;).