I had a very very similar experience. I saw the craziest code in my entire career while debugging performance issues. Even though they were using a PHP MVC framework, they were pulling every record from a db table to iterate over to find the record using PHP string compare functions. I still can't believe it. The dev shop I worked for back then was even in the habit of hiring multiple teams for the same project in the hopes one actually completed it and it was still cheaper.
> pulling every record from a db table to iterate over to find the record using PHP string compare functions
As horrible as this sounds, this is actually good from a refactoring point of view because it should be straightforward to rewrite it to use actual queries.
Perhaps technically true, but the entire point of the MVC is you can do simple record retrievals with a single line of code using auto generated active record models. One line vs a monstrous dirty function isn't acceptable.
