The 1st year the windows centric project manager tried to replace Oracle/Perl/dozens of linux box parallel processing and my hand picked project successor that I had been training and then working with for years, and gave it to a Windows buddy who attempted to rewrite it for a SQL Server/VB environment with a variety of reporting tools tacked on.

It had taken me 6 months to sell/plan it, once sold: 3 months to create the infrastructure (buy big solaris/little linux boxes, Gbit/FC/large disk), while coding dozens of variations of possible production methods using Perl and Oracle and SyncSort and (whatever), created a full month's worth of processing and then optimized it down to a week, threw a chair at my boss when he told me to work SMARTER (thanks towelboy), and then babysat it for 2 month's of productions, then trained my mentee and moved onto my next project, occasionally being called in for design/code meeting for addons.

It ran for 3 YEARS and was the largest amount of profit that company had ever seen, at the cost of 20% of a perl/unix programmer and 50% of a clerical assistant/production person. Paid for the lights and rent and a lot of celebrations (of which I was not part of).

It took him about a year before he turned it on. In that process he alienated the current staff on purpose, most left and/or were fired, and there were multiple failed monthly productions, in which the company had to write checks to ameriquest in the $300,000 range.

After he claimed it was all my system's fault, and then turned his on, they lost the account within a couple of months and destroyed the database division of the company.

Poof.