I worked for two years at a big corporation (mostly as an experiment, but also to prove that I could) on a huge and somewhat important internal project (meaning that we're were never going to be killed because we represented a thing that would save millions of dollars when it finally worked AND we had no external users that could abandon us, ours was a captive audience.)

> At the time this becomes clear the manager who made the previous has already been promoted somewhere else and the next guy will make another quick decision to fix the previous problem. Then this guy gets promoted too and the cycle continues.

Not only did I see that happen two or three times while I was there, but the project itself had been crapped out by some cowboy coder who stood up a demo, got some traction for it, and moved on to greater things. He had a rep as a Rockstar because of this project but if you actually looked at what he did (as I had to every day) it was a rickety un-designed P.O.S. that could barely function. It was a glorified spreadsheet basically, but of course not implemented on top of the in-house spreadsheet product. We rolled our own TableView... It also crashed on importing more than 25K (not M, K) records, which was one of the main reasons it had been started in the first place: the existing system it was meant to replace was slow on large ("large") datasets. The new system wasn't slow, it just crashed. This was progress.

But the money was good. Food too.

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edit, I started getting flashbacks to that job after writing the above. Hoo boy was that ever a shocking place to work. I feel like I was kidnapped by aliens for two years.

The software was a textbook case of the "Lava Flow" anti-pattern: http://antipatterns.com/lavaflow.htm It had at least five distinct waves of rewrites, all of which were left petrified in the code.

At one point the dispatch system was rewritten in this weird not-OOP, not-Aspect, not-Actor, style, during a wave of the "composition-not-inheritance" fad that comes and goes. I remember opening up one of the affect modules and thinking, "This is like Romulan code." It was so strange.