Worst abuses of NIH syndrome?

Question

Last place I worked at had a massive NIH issue.

They ended up rewriting the complete ASP.NET stack (forms, controls, validation, postback handling, ajax library etc...)

What is the worst case of NIH you have had the misfortune to work on?

Answer 1

Do we need a DailyWTF tag? ;)

Answer 2

I worked with a contractor who created his own MVC framework on top of ASP.Net, his own OR mapper and his own testing framework. This was not too long ago when nHibernate, MonoRail and nUnit were common.

Of course things fell apart when he had to update everything to a newer version of the .Net framework, and of course everything was tightly-coupled to everything else in his collection of frameworks so he couldn't gradually switch things over. And of course after a few weeks of this nightmare he went missing.

Answer 3

You mean writing your own programming language to write a wonderful bug tracking software? I heard he's switching to VB.NET now. In the recent SO podcast, he mentioned he got the habit from Excel team, which also wrote their own compiler to fit the app into a floppy disk, to get around 32-bit pointer implementation etc..

I don't blame him because it is fun to write a domain-specific language.

Answer 4

But it's FUN! I mean it's more interesting for me to develop a framework than to use a framework. It's a business people who have to stop me and say: "Just use this and get the job done". I'm working for the company that developed it's own Java MVC and i have no objections to that.

Answer 5

How about a custom replacement of log4j, Hibernate, MVC, and database (with its own SQL-isque query language and markup), all rolled up into one hairy framework?

Answer 6

We've written our own browser. Actually, we're just using the WebBrowser control, but we wrapped it and had to do all sorts of COM Interop to make it behave like Internet Explorer (i.e. handle popup windows, modal windows, etc.). Oh, and it also loads up WinForms applications via web URL... because we're using a custom version of ClickOnce that we wrote ourselves.

We joked about performing a rewrite based on the Google Chrome source :)