I've had a few. Projects that were so vaguely specified we didn't know what to do. So we went to the manager, who didn't know either. And they took us to the

I've had a few. Projects that were so vaguely specified we didn't know what to do. So we went to the manager, who didn't know either. And they took us to the salesman that actually sold the project, and he didn't know either. Then a call with the customer who didn't really know what they wanted. Finally an executive would tell us to just start building something so we had billable hours to charge. Then at another company there were the bonus projects. Our annual bonuses depended on completing a project that was not part of our normal work - almost always the pet project of a manager in another department. Inevitably it'd be over halfway through the year before we got the first info about it, and by the time we got started, it had already been canceled or that manager had left the company and no one else knew anything about it. I never heard of anyone at that company getting a bonus project that wasn't DOA. And this didn't happen to me, but one place I worked got a government contract. They had to hire someone officially approved, and a couple of us worked with him early on to discuss what he was going to be working on and how his project would interface with ours. Then, still pretty early on, the government agency paused his project. But it had already been funded and there was the contract, which said he couldn't work on any other projects. So he spent the rest of the year reading, playing games, and asking every now and then whether the project had been greenlit yet (it never was). And another job, there was one guy I worked with, who despite being a fairly good developer and decent designer as well, routinely got tasked with typing in content that another department printed out and passed to our manager. That was one full day's work per week. We asked if they could give us access to their system so he could just copy and paste it over, but they said no. However, they let slip what their system was and when we looked at it, there was a public RSS feed of the content that they were printing out and handing over for him to retype into our system. It took less than one hour to setup something to process that feed in the background, import it to our system, and free up 20% of his time. That's hundreds of hours per year. This stuff is very common everywhere.