I can only assume your coworker had quite an elaborate setup, as most ircds (e.g., ircu, charybdis, ircd-hybrid) take an hour, tops, to configure and get running.
As a novice, it took several hours to wade through the configuration files when setting up an IRCd, and additional time to configure services daemons. I also continually run into issues with configuration decisions I made before using the daemon more actively.
While I could have relied on the defaults, I wouldn't trust my users' data with a default configuration. It would be irresponsible at best, and this is even more important to companies.
