I once did some contract work for a development group at Apple in the late 90's working on a product not yet released. It was the first time I was exposed to a

I once did some contract work for a development group at Apple in the late 90's working on a product not yet released. It was the first time I was exposed to a large codebase that could be updated by any of a large number of programmers at any time. While investigating a bug, it was scary to constantly see large, complicated routines headed with comments from 20 or 30 people logging the changes they had made. There would be no consistent style of code, no consistent quality, no consistent formatting, no real sense of ownership, a real free-for-all. The system not only immediately projected a sense of hopelessness, but also indicated that any attempts at improvement would quickly be clobbered by future sloppy changes.