Sounds like business as usual to me. Non computer people try to solve a problem internally with existing tooling, but the scale gets out of control and they hi

Sounds like business as usual to me. Non computer people try to solve a problem internally with existing tooling, but the scale gets out of control and they hire a specialist, whether accounting or computer scientist. Most of the jobs I have consist of a company already hacking together a solution from canned software or having a prototype of what they wanted, don't think this is weird at all. Are you suggesting they should have built a well architected Java program from the start? I'm not so sure. 1 - It's easy to say with monday's newspaper, companies can move fast and then worry about the consequences later if they grow and are succesful. Internal proyects or the whole company can be unsuccessful so you can tag on tech debt and worry about it if it needs to survive, happens all the time. As a curious note, the legal system supports this, companies have limited liability so courts are ok with letting companies that go too deep into the red (tech debt or cash) collapse into 0. 2- Overengineering is also a risk, although usually the failure mode is it never takes off the ground, but what's to say the couldn't have hired a -10x engineer to build their accounts system and then needed to hire an actual 10x engineer to fix the mess? 3- This seems like an accounting problem domain, I think if a company has classically trained accountants you avoid this problem, and if you don't then you get this problem regardless of whether using excel or a programming language. Double entry bookkeeping has been around for centuries. (I'm guessing an accountant helped build the specs for whatever you built for 1M$). Good accountants can handle huge (+1M) companies with pen and paper, and regularly do so with Excel, so I'm not buying that excel was the culprit here. That said 1M$ is a lot, congrats!