[strick]

One best practice is to RESPECT the people who built the systems that are already in place. Think about it, they were able to achieve so much financial success that they were able to hire the best and brightest: YOU

So, respectfully implement the obvious stuff like version control, backups, etc and leave all of the 'can you believe how crappy this is' attitude at home. I'm extrapolating a bit from your 'horrendously designed' and 'zero knowledge' comments. Those people probably still work there, or are thought of fondly by the people who remain!

[jdsfighter]

Actually, the developer that designed the system was laid off over two years ago, and the database has since been maintained by one of the other managers at the location. Everyone at the company has stated how he was a hard worker, but didn't know the first thing about database design, and while he worked as best as he could with the knowledge he had, he still left them with a rather terrible setup.

I don't really blame him, it's as if I asked a chef to design me a rocket ship, it was simply something he didn't know, and instead relied on information gathered through quick google searches and tinkering.

[strick]

OK. But still don't throw that former employee under the bus. Your attitude should always remain 'there is room for improvement' and not 'this sucks'.

One thing to keep in mind is that technology at almost every company you will ever work for will be held together with some combination of duct tape and bailing wire. I have seen tables with no normalization whatsoever that support tens of millions of dollars of revenue. They key factor with IT is that it needs to work. And since these things tend to grow organically, almost none of them are optimized.