I had this happen on two occasions - once as a academic, once as a sys admin. In the academic setting, we needed to put together a way of annotating a chromosome and putting the information up on the web for folk to access. This was easy to do - prior work had been documented, tools were avaialble, the boss was reasonable. In this case fast, good a cheap all worked together.

In my first job out of academia, I was working for a games company out of Boulder, CO. It wsa all about spend nothing, get it done yesterday, and it has to be like a $10K commercial product.

The network boss was a bit of a 'wide lad' - talked up a storm, had adequate NT skills and was the proverbial 100 monkeys typing on a keyboard with root access under Unix. They had a home brewed trouble ticket system that was a nightmare of early Perl4 scripts. The first day I was there the intranet broke - someone buggered up the secure keys. That got fixed after a week of persuading them to spend $200 on a key. The perl code I never got to the bottom of - in the end I wrote a new set of scripts to do what had been done by the old scripts. I was never so happy to get out of a job as that place.

MadraghRua
yet another biologist hacking perl....