My inherited spaghetti codebase took only 24 months for my predecessor to build. I was told: "don't worry, it's in SVN and all of the important switches are clearly laid out at the top."
Well, it was in an SVN repo... with a single commit.
It did have all the important switches at the top, none of them but the ones that were set actually worked.
It was a wordpress site for a company written by some 16 year old intern. Terribly fun. No version management. The main folder had multiple older copies of itself in seemingly random subfolders. It went deep. The CSS was stored partially in CSS files, of which there were 20 (!) loaded from the theme folder, partially in one of the 40+ plugins used (not an exageration). But there was also plenty of CSS in the templates, the database and seemingly random third party servers. The favicon was 20MB large. It used like 4 plugins for “custom fields” all of which had infected large swathes of the database, and all of which did... something. Much like the root folder had nested copies of itself there was something similar going on in there... I simply didn’t bother by the time I understood what the hell was going on. The templates were basically this premium theme of “customized” php, the fun part was that in some page templates it basically rendered a bunch of different pages inside the template (the guy apparently didn’t understand the concept of closing tags, yet somehow made it work. It was incomprehensible.) and then used custom css to hide the pages that shouldn’t be visible. Basically the entire thing was some satanic equillibrium of bugs cancelling eachother out.
Well, it was in an SVN repo... with a single commit.
It did have all the important switches at the top, none of them but the ones that were set actually worked.
Man, I "miss" that job.