Oh. I have yet to encounter one of these that I'd take seriously.

I have an anecdote, from a friend of mine, from the 1990s.

He was a fairly well-paid team leader for an NYC bank. Ran a C++ shop. He had to wear a tie to work, but was paid enough to buy a house, in his twenties.

In any case, when I knew him, he was an even-higher-paid consultant, working for the same bank. This time, he wore a three-piece bespoke suit to work. He now owned a house in Port Washington, and he was still in his early thirties.

He told me that the bank wanted to release some new server-based product. This was before the Web was really a thing, so it probably was an EDI system (I didn't ask him what, as I knew he wouldn't tell me).

He consulted with his team, and submitted a proposal for a C++ project, taking several months, and costing six figures.

Some VP (banks have lots of those) came in, and had been studying Visual Basic. He also hated the IT teams (they can be like that, you know).

He told his higher-ups that he could write the whole thing, in VB, in half the time, for a quarter of the money (since he'd be doing most of the work, himself).

Stop me, if you've heard this before...

My friend lost the bid. He quit the company (along with most of his team), and traveled around the world for a couple of years.

When he got back, the bank was in a shambles. The VP had screwed the pooch in a big way, and was long fired. Attempts to redo the project were dumpster fires, since they no longer had any trained engineers on staff, and they couldn't hire new staff.

They were begging my friend to come back.

And the rest is history...