[broken-kebab]

I worked with a project which to be compiled required years-old versions of esoteric tools, long-abandoned libs, unreadable scripts, and a lot of guesses (docs where written by someone who had very limited knowledge of English). It took weeks to re-create the environment locally, but it was still not the same thing vs the build machine (single), and produced occasionally different errors. Interestingly, this situation to some extent was deliberate: for some reason the project was hated by middle-level management, but they couldn't obtain permission to sunset it from tops, so essentially they were slowly asphyxiating it by not allocating time for fixes, upgrades, and automation

[MilStdJunkie]

Holy Moses does this sound familiar. I've yet to deal with any aspect of ERP that isn't (among other things) horribly, horribly coupled to the installation's target environment.

"But of COURSE you should edit this system DLL to make a bog-simple content management system function . ."

No, no, really I shouldn't. The hell planet you from?

"It's INDUSTRY STANDARD!"[1]

Oh for the love of Christ, not this again. Go sit in the corner with the other fifty-seven "industry standards".

[1] I'm going to blow a gasket the next time someone gives me this without a numbered citation or CDRL item.

[TheNewsIsHere]

A friend of mine worked on firmware that shipped on hardware made by a household name and installed en masse through the entire US. Fairly essential infrastructure.

I almost asked if you’re that friend. The difference is that with what he was working on, it was a beloved money maker that was implausible to materially change because of recertification costs.

The last I heard, they were buying second-hand IDE licenses on eBay because the IDE package had been EOL’d ~10-15 years prior.