What they asked for: Refreshing their suit of unit tests, 10,000 of them, that had gone stale (that applied to their widely used C++ telephony library)

Budget NZ$1,000,000

(Don't ask what, why, really?)

I joined half way through

Half the budget spent, nothing to show, mission mysteriously changed to producing a deep packet inspection tool. (What happened to the unit tests you ask? Be quiet! Take the money)

My job was to reach deep into their system and bring the data to the surface, roughly speaking

Thing is nobody that worked on the library wanted, needed, or asked for any aspect of what were doing

The design for it was written on a whiteboard by the project lead before I joined

Then the whiteboard was cleaned.

So the design was in one man's head

That man, the project lead, quit 3 weeks before delivery

On handover day I was a bit afraid, I had taken care to keep good records of my obeying (increasingly unhinged) instructions, so I was confident I could not be blamed (I was younger and naive-not part of the story)

But I fully expected an unpleasant "you did what with our money? What were you thinking?" type of unpleasant meeting

Instead the corporate types sat around a table gushing how wonderful everything was, what a brilliant job we'd all done...

I was stunned. I understand now, I learnt that day, that it was in no-one's interest to acknowledge the waste of a million bucks

Coming from academia, as I was more or less, this was a valuable lesson.

But utterly worthless software for a million dollars

I still use some of the furniture I bought with the money....