I actually did that for a system. I had grown a major case of the ass about my job. I hated working there and I hated spending effort on the work they made me do. They hired me to fix the legacy systems the previous .NET developer had made (and they were all OS X people who didn't have the courage to even look at a Windows machine), but every time something went wrong, they wouldn't let me fix the issue, they would only approve me time to fiddle the data in the database. "Just brute force it" was some kind of mantra from our CEO. Somewhere in the last 5 years, it seems non-technical people overheard the "brute force" meme and display the notion that they believe it's the always-practical, never-difficult solution to a problem when the programmer would prefer an overly engineered solution of negligible or negative gain.

So I had gotten tired of people forgetting their single-english-word passwords and making me overwrite their MD5 hashed password to a known-value that mapped to something like "password123" (yes, no salting for the hashes). So instead of manually resetting the password in the database all the time, I banged out a small web app that ran on my machine for printing every user and reversing all of their MD5 hash'd passwords. It didn't work for the ones who had chosen actual, random strings for their passwords, but that was maybe 1% of cases.

And then I shared the IP address to my machine as a link for every other engineer in the company (all 3 of them). One of the other engineers freaked out that I had "exposed" the passwords, but as far as I was concerned, the passwords were already exposed. He shut up when I pointed out that the work was done and that I had other things to do, things that were his responsibility but he couldn't do because he had a habit of taking on too much work.

From that point on, any time I had more than 2 repetitions to do something, I'd write the most basic of web app to do it, and I'd shove it onto that little server on my machine. The future repetitions would invariably come in and I'd save tons of time not doing it the manual way.

Seriously, this was easy stuff. Don't take this to mean I'm bragging about it. I'm mentioning it because it is so simple and so obvious of work to do in these cases, and it eventually got me fired. I made the mistake of trying to get credit for the work I did, for saving the company time, freeing myself up to do other work, and all the CEO could see was that I was no longer able to charge 3 hours to create new accounts in the system now that it took less than a minute through my admin app. "Wasn't bringing enough value to the company." One of my reports found a quarter million dollars in lost licensing revenue. Wasn't bringing enough value to the company.

So it's not just programmers who can be grossly incompetent. Oh, they certainly can be, I've had to clean up my fair share of systems. But I've found far more often that systems are bad because the programmer's manager was an asshole idiot who made unreasonable demands and forced the programmer to make compromises. Maybe that programmer wasn't the best programmer, but nobody can do as good of work as they are capable in that situation.