Many years ago, I was asked to help a customer with a problem they were having. I don’t remember the details, and they aren’t important to the story anyway, but as I was investigating one of their crashes, I started to wonder why they were even doing it. I expressed my concerns to the customer liaison. “Why are they writing this code in the first place? The performance will be terrible, and it’ll never work exactly the way they want it to.”

The customer liaison confided, “Yeah, I thought the same thing. But this is a feature they’re adding to the next version of their product. The product is so far behind schedule, they’ve been cutting features like mad to get back on track. But they can’t cut this feature. It’s the last one left!”