Yes. I worked at a company that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, and nearly a year, on a server monitoring system that never acheived a high enough timeseries resolution to actually solve the problem it was funded for. Then a 20-year veteran of the company stepped in and wrote a 50-line shell script, pushed it to the relevant machines, plugged it into the timeseries database, and solved the problem. He called it his 89¢ solution.
Eww. Were there extenuating factors though? The monitoring system was somebody's pet project, or was purchased under contract on the hopes and dreams of sales, or the monitoring software did work but not in that specific environment, or...?
I've seen this exact same thing too. The "extenuating" (if you could call it that) factor was that the monitoring software was written in house and it was just shit. It might have been a pet project initially, but it didn't end up that way. It was just continued out of some combination of habit, risk aversion and not invented here syndrome.
When dumped and replaced by one of the better OSS versions in a few days by a developer who got fed up, things "magically" got much better, very quickly.
No praise or career boost at all for the developer in question, though. I think a large number of people (from management down) were embarrassed by the whole affair and wanted to forget about it. It seems that praise can only be dished out if you didn't embarrass somebody important.
IMHO, the person selected to run the original project was a beneficiary of the Peter Principle, and on top of that, left the company before the project was completed. I wasn't directly involved, but I specifically remember the hero of the story complaining about having been "sold a bill of goods" -- i.e., the company was promised the new system would perform screamingly, but when push came to shove, it didn't.
