In the early 2000's the consulting firm I worked for got a customer who was building a "revolutionary" (their words) new medical software suite. They were havin

In the early 2000's the consulting firm I worked for got a customer who was building a "revolutionary" (their words) new medical software suite. They were having difficulties shipping the product so we were hired to help. Turns out they were insanely paranoid about IP theft, so they had 20-30 programmers working on the code, each had zero access to any other programmer's slice (i.e. source code) of the app, only being allowed to use libraries and APIs to interact with. No one except the execs had access to the entire codebase, thus no code reviews, no unified architecture or design agreements; basically it was an app made up of 20-30 independent apps, all doing things differently without any coordination. After we got hired they fired all of their programmers and gave us the entire source code, it took months just to be able to build the app at all from source, but it was such a mess it was impossible to make something remotely shippable. One day they vanished and owed us nearly $800,000. It was enough that our parent company just shut us down a few months later. Oddly enough we had a really good group of developers and likely could have rebuilt the whole app ourselves, but our parent insisted on trying to recover the money instead of just taking the IP.