Previous company had a couple large programs, all in VB6. Back in the Windows 98 days, one of the accountants literally bought a copy of "Teach yourself Visual Basic in 21 Days", and wrote the first version of one of these programs. He had no formal computer science training or other programming experience.

Well, other people in accounting borrowed the book and built more and more features into this program, and created a couple other similar programs.

At no time did they consider 'maybe we should bring some real programmers into this' or re-write any of the code, and now they're stuck on this code and they have 4 'very bad' programmers working on it. It's a huge buggy mess with every bad programming practice you can think of.