Procurement built an offboarding tool that forgets the offboarding

“We didn't have time for architecture.”— Plant Manager

Reason:

Honestly? Because the bug is now documented behaviour. Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Daniel, someone from Procurement

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Python and a cron job on a laptop

Database:

Redis with persistence disabled because "it is only a cache"

Authentication:

the password is the company name plus 2026

Deployment:

deployed from the main branch because branches were confusing

Responsible:

Elena, who inherited it from Daniel by accident

Documentation:

a Miro board that takes 7 minutes to load

Security situation:

there is one shared admin account

Future disaster:

It will discover the backups have never been restored.

Age: 1.5 years · originally expected to last 4 weeks · 2 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 3 days ago · original builder left 383 days ago

Rated common mostly because: alive 19x longer than intended, the builder has left, 1 departments depend on it.