[donatj]

We had a project in an old but perfectly serviceable framework. The application was working fine, we just wanted some basic regular maintenance, and corporate decided we should outsource it as we didn't have a lot of time between us.

We gave the external team explicit instructions that they should continue to use the existing framework, as they'd asked to rewrite it in a newer framework. Just add simple features and maintain what's there.

The project comes back very troubled, barely working and just feels janky. Things that have worked fine for a decade are broken. None of us look at the code, as that was the goal, but instead we just keep sending back revisions. Every time they fix something, something else breaks.

Well after multiple rounds of back and forth failing to get a very basic form working correctly, we decide to dig in and fix it ourselves. We discover that instead of using the existing framework, they'd written a giant janky adapter layer translating their framework of choice to satisfy the existing framework. It completely undermined the point of keeping the existing framework which was to keep changes to a minimum. We wanted maintenance, not a rewrite.

The whole codebase was a confused mess no person in their right mind would want to maintain. I have never been so frustrated in my life. After we confronted them about it, and they adamantly defended it, we ended up firing them.