Procurement built a shift planner that emails PDFs

“It's read-only except for updates.”— Daniel, Procurement

Reason:

Honestly? Because the automation sends an email asking someone to do it manually. Presented in a town hall as "innovation".

Built by:

Daniel, the management assistant

Build time:

4 hours 54 minutes

Built with:

Python and a cron job on a laptop

Database:

a private Slack channel called #data-backup

Authentication:

everyone uses the admin account

Deployment:

behind a load balancer pointing to exactly one machine

Responsible:

Thomas, according to nobody except Lukas

Documentation:

a Miro board that takes 7 minutes to load

Security situation:

the tenant ID comes directly from the query string

Future disaster:

It will cause Legal to ask "who approved this?".

Age: 2.2 years · originally expected to last 7 days · 5 owners so far · survived 1 reorganisation · last meaningful change 19 days ago · original builder left 768 days ago

Rated legendary mostly because: €2.0m per year, 753 users, alive 113x longer than intended.