Comment by Jtsummers

It happens in aerospace as well. I had a manager boasting, once, about the skill of his people and the product with something like, "This was 100k lines of code!". In working with some of those people (a couple specific individuals) later I realized that the 100k lines of code was probably reducible to 10-20k lines of code if it was anything like their later work. The code they wrote worked, but was not extendable or comprehensible by anyone but them, and I spent more time refactoring and shrinking their work than actually extending it.