
Ask HN: What are some ridiculous dev stories? I'm collecting for a book - jakobov
I am working on writing a free book that is collection of ridiculous programing stories.<p>I thought HN would be a great place to fish for stories.<p>If you are interested in sharing a story you can respond to this thread with the story or send me an email:  zohar.jackson+stories@gmail.com<p>Obviously all stories will be professionally edited and wont be published until receiving permission from original writer.<p>Looking forward!
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carapace
I worked at a company that has a flagship product that is a web-based
spreadsheet.

The company uses huge spreadsheets to manage their network infrastructure.

These spreadsheets are so large that their own flagship web-based spreadsheet
cannot handle them, so there's a whole section of the company running Excel on
Windows workstations to manage them.

I worked on a replacement project for that.

It was also a web-based spreadsheet.

It was about three years old when I joined the project and I worked on it for
two more years (before quitting.)

Punchline: It also could not handle the large spreadsheets.

(Sad truth: tens of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of dev-hours
wasted with zero payoff. PMs getting promoted up and out and leaving the
project behind resulted in a classic "Lava Flow"[1] mess. You could actually
see the layers in the code and VCS.)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_flow_(programming)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_flow_\(programming\))

