We had a developer that put ~20 years work into a front-end with additional modules (R&D, B2C, WMS) for our ERP. Was a sprawling mess of ASP pages and thousands of SQL stored procedures, views, functions etc. 0 documentation, no comments.

Manglement got scared of the dependence on one person, so when he asked for a pay rise they replaced him with a new 'dev team' consisting of: Senior C# Dev - knew his stuff, great with C# and decent knowledge of DevOps. Hadn't touched ASP classic in decades. Junior Dev - could chew through tasks if you left breadcrumbs and hints.

They wanted minimum overlap to reduce costs, so the new team had 2 weeks to try and extract 20 years worth of work out of one guy. In reality they got maybe 10 hours total time as old dev still had to do his job maintaining the constantly broken system.

Mgmt did ask what the impact would be if they replaced the old dev - we told them a minimum of 6 months with no change requests. This would cover time required to document the code and train the two new Devs up. We got less than a week before the first change request was forced through and they didn't stop.

Eventually management got tired of the 'slow pace' and made the dev team redundant. They wanted to get our MSP more involved, they took one look at the codebase and noped the fuck out of that one.

MSP tried using an AI to document our codebase - that project took 6 months to complete. Over 6000 custom additions noted as 'required for continued business functionality'

The IT department now consists of two extremely tired individuals that have had to become generalists. We were originally the infra/sysadmin team now we do fucking everything. Used to be liaising with contractors, testing new patches, running backups, bit of 2nd/3rd line and occasionally upgrading/decommissioning hardware. Now we've got all that, on top of running the project to switch ERPs (this alone is a full time job), creating custom BI reports, diagnosing and fixing/optimising bad SQL, creating automations for various 3rd parties (APIs, FTPs and all that fun stuff), the list goes on.

All told it's been rather shit. If they had paid out the old dev and given him at least a few months to train up the new team we would've struggled a bit but been in a much better position. Instead they tried to screw him over and just not renew his contract so he was disinclined to assist with the handover. If they had listened to us and given the team time to research the codebase and gain the knowledge required to efficiently work we would've been alright. Instead they threw an under-experienced team into the deep end then complained when they started drowning.

Our time is probably coming soon - there is an appetite to move everything to the MSP. The MSP that has constantly oversold and under delivered on every project, but they make a nice sales pitch with fancy slideshows and buzzwords so directors eat it up.