I started work at a place I was initially very excited about.  They had openings because they had some turnover and their senior expert developer had left.  The product line was impressive (on paper I was soon to discover) and had flashy demonstration products. 

One of my first assignments was to look into why at times the widget on the display sometimes was missing data.  I happily dug into it and got more and more disappointed with this career move as I went.  The product line was touted as being reusable, but it was hardcoded throughout, as if whoever had developed it was unaware of templates or configuration techniques.  There were hand-rolled source code files (Java, and not auto-generated) that were more than 3000 lines long.  It was a truly a pile of spaghetti where I eventually discovered the underlying problem was thread contention in the bottom of the source.  It was going to be impossible to correct due to the severe coupling of the source without a major rewrite. 

When I presented this finding, the lead got quite irate and asked me, “Why’d we pay that guy a year to develop this!?!?” 

Like I’m supposed to know? 

Sorry dude, that jokefest of a source code tree isn’t on me.  lol