And in the other 10% a simple typo can cost your company millions of dollars.

I've seen an "ETL" solution (minus the "T") written entirely in SQL but using XML instead of tables and columns. After traveling through multiple servers via OpenQuery it eventually gets loaded into a domain-specific piece. That piece passes the data into a frontend that can only run in quirks mode.

That frontend has 60-80 separate projects that all parse out basically the same data but from different fields and with different parsing/mapping logic. There is no ability to load shared libraries or otherwise de-duplicate code and no authorization to call out to any internal web services that could be written to handle it. Nor is there any form of templating available, it's all static files with no nesting of folders allowed. And the whole thing is managed in a domain-specific editor that effectively precludes the use of version control thanks to the way it stores files.

Two people are responsible for managing that frontend piece and more.

The main author of the SQL side and original author of the frontend has been promoted to the top because the system is critical to the business needs, and since everyone else struggles to work with this monstrosity they must be a pretty great developer. Can't afford to lose them.

The frontend team have threatened to quit several times unless things get better. They've been demanding version control, CI, automated deployments, a shared library, and to not use the domain-specific editor piece that prevents all this.

Management (including (or because of?) the OG author) is convinced that they're pushing for these things because of job security and refuse to let them overcomplicate things. But every time they they threaten to quit they get pretty substantial raises because no one else is willing/able to deal with the mess they were left with.

If you ask me, no amount of money is worth that environment, but all parties involved still work there...

For instance piping though commands works fine until one character sequence is interpreted as EOF. The fun part is it will work most of the time, and when it fails nobody will understand why (“we didn’t touch anything”), and rewriting the thing will be a political nightmare (“it was working before and was only 3 lines, why you need so much time to redo it ?”)

I think most people (me included) don’t do enough shell programming to really know the trade-off of the one-liner vs doing it in groovy, so the latter becomes the safer option (rightly so IMO)

I know this is just an example, but how would that happen?

    % printf '\x04\necho EOT is not EOF in a pipe.\n' | bash
    bash: line 1: $'\004': command not found
    EOT is not EOF in a pipe.
    %

As much as I might like Java, this surely did not make any sense, but when people want to pay you for doing it, oh well.