Yep. mysterious and unsolvable breakage: Helping another startup work through one now. It's a case of reclaiming functionality from a mystery outsourced codeba

Yep. mysterious and unsolvable breakage: Helping another startup work through one now. It's a case of reclaiming functionality from a mystery outsourced codebase (without source control) meets inexperienced developers who try their hand at sysadmin plus a 100% rotated bevy of actors (the whole team, PM and all, have jumped ship), no documentation and no technical oversight. Offshore outsourcing adds cultural fun. unpleasantness: I would expand this to unpleasant or incomprehensible. I have seen projects be de-resourced because of lack of management comprehension when they literally paved the best and most rapid path to profit (later taken successfully by the now-dominant competition). antiquation: The best example of this I've seen was a hardware product an employer was developing as a joint venture in Taiwan early in my career. Engineers had made the decision to use a sucky chipset from a struggling company to save money, but the supplier went under and the API froze (bugs, missing functionality and all) before our product development could complete. The target feature set was literally impossible to implement on the hardware and nobody wanted ownership. Many millions of USD, wasted. replacement: It can work out, just infrequently. Generally when it works it's a smaller system with well defined interfaces.