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When I was 18 my dad got me a job for a drilling company who had their own in-house software. The original programmer was actually a mud engineer with no formal education who had wanted to learn to program. He had lied to the owner of the company, saying he could write software. Once he was assigned the project of designing this particular application (cost analysis + well planning + daily reporting), he began taking night classes and buying tutorial software and books and such to learn how to code (all on the company's tab).
$275k and 5 years later, they had a barely-running piece of software written in Visual Basic with literally no GUI consistency, and a completely unintuitive method of user input and organization. The application required 14 separately-purchased ActiveX controls, the database was an MsSQL database filtered through Access, and it was network-less software, so the database had to be detached to be transferred from system to system (usually by mailing the files on a CD-ROM back and forth). Also, the source code had been destroyed because the guy was terrified about job security.
I was hired to take the software and make it web-based so that they didn't have to do all the database attach/detach crap anymore. When I discovered the source code was deleted from the development system the guy had used, I had to approach the owner and my supervisor and inform them that there was no way for me to edit the existing software, and that we'd have to start anew. I finished the project in 5 months.
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