Depends on the context. 1. A significant 're-architecting' of parts of our backend to metaphorically sell cars off the back of a truck... It was one of the few

Depends on the context. 1. A significant 're-architecting' of parts of our backend to metaphorically sell cars off the back of a truck... It was one of the few parts of an auto lease financier's chain that didn't have a called-out contract with one of the major players. I suppose this one wasn't entirely useless as we were able to reuse some of the concepts for future integration work. 2. At another shop, we did an integration with a startup that was providing a reasonably related service. Part of the gig was we were going to get something like 10$ for every client signed up. I think the project was a good 3-5 months of 1 Sr, 1-2 normal devs, a BA and QA's time. In the first 12 months after launch I don't even think we got enough to cover a weeks worth of pizza for the team. 3. Was not my team but I saw it happen, one of the above shops also wound up deciding 'Everyone should use the same ORM because cogs in a machine'. This included having a fully in production product port their entire app's NHibernate logic to EF6 on Oracle 11... This did not end well for the project at all, as on top of being a huge timesink to get things 'working', performance tanked and it hurt the project's already heavy maintenance costs.