[bane]

I once worked at a place that, at some point in the past, had developed some kind of semantic graph database that never gained market traction.

The author of it had ended up as CTO and kept seeking out uses for his work and ended up finding all kinds of odd places for it to live, including as the auth database in a large scale document analytics system and running part of the payroll.

We were constantly running into all kinds of scalability issues where this 12 year old component was often the source of our pain, but he'd never even entertain a conversation to eliminate it and consolidate or replace it with something better.

[duxup]

I worked for a company that was old but had a fancy new product. It was just about to be released when....

A competitor bought us for stupid money. They fired most folks (not my small department) had their CTO decide between our fancy new product, and the product he created. There was no question, our product was amazing, his Frankenstein was two pieces of equipment cabled together in three items the footprint ... and still did less, and was quite a ways away from being "ready".

If there was a silver lining, the Frankenstein product doomed that company and we got bought by the far more competent competitor they had.

[qbaqbaqba]

Happy ending.

[duxup]

It's surprising how that works. I've been through numerous mergers, acquisitions, been in the company acquiring a company.

Lots of hair pulling and I can say that it was really hard to predict the outcome for any individual positive or negative in every case until long afterward.

[seibelj]

This is the definition of software engineering hubris distilled into a few paragraphs

[pimeys]

I think I know the company. We were almost acquired by them until they hit the rocks and we took a hit. Interesting to hear how that database was a pain to manage.

[emmanueloga_]

There aren't many of these databases around... Which database was that? is it still around?