Met this kind of person three times so far, been asking myself the same question. I suspect they live too much in their own head.
Only a completely idiot would use copyrighted code from their previous job, and work for months without putting anything into version control.
And, above all, not have anything actually working, like forms not actually saving data, after months of work.
Nope, bozo.
In the words of TFAs author:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
It was obviously a complete trainwreck, but it worked enough to convince multiple executives at different companies to actually pay for this crap. Sure it went down every week and was leaking data left and right, but it looked legit.
I clearly don’t appreciate the architecture or the reliability of it, but the tenacity of the people able to build such a monstrosity day in and day out, somehow wrangling it into shape against all odds. That’s the sort of mental willpower I wish I had.
Of course to scram once the going got rough.
So once you write a test harness in order to make sure your refractors don't break things, you start to notice that the things you're testing are wrong. The code doesn't work correctly, it is littered with bugs.
Actually just finished a refactor like that. In a fairly small refactor I found multiple things that weren't working correctly. It was sending duplicated messages, it was incorrectly labeling messages with duplicate sequence numbers, and lots more.
I wrote equivalent code to replace it, spending roughly half the number of lines and getting rid of a complete shitload of unnecessary method parameters and other pointless stuff. Also fixed a hot path with an unnecessary O(n^2) complexity (where n could be pretty high) and a bunch of other dumb crap.
Note: I don't know anything about basketball.