[phaedrus]

When my previous employer forced my team to implement storage of structured data as a serialized BLOB (on top of a system which used to store the data the "right" way), I turned in my resignation.

Background: we had been storing other, similar data in a structured way for years, so we had a system set up to do it right. I'm not sure what the rationale was for switching, but it was declared by fiat over the protests of a team of five experienced .NET developers and an experienced lead DBA. We began experiencing problems from it before we were even a month into the project, such as serialization output not agreeing between client apps (.NET serialization is NOT designed to be a shared archive format!!), implementation requiring breaking the separation of concerns between layers of our application, etc. And for what? When asked what we would do when the format changes, management cheerfully replied "oh we'll just write + run a conversion EXE to update the data in bulk. Why, we do that all the time in [other engineering team who cowboy-codes everything and operates with a level of technical debt that makes it suck to work on that codebase]."

Of course this wasn't the only reason I was resigning, but it made the decision easier!