So we offered a solution to our customers, and then we could customize this by offering our own "consultant" developers. In the end, each developer had a goal to be "80% of their time billable".
Now we sometimes had to write these things called "channels", which took about 2 weeks to write. If we would have rewritten the framework behind it (which would take about 2 weeks) we could have probably sped up writing channels to less than a week! The thing was, nobody really cared if it took 2 weeks or less than a week, since the customer paid for it. My statement of 'let the customer pay for the 2 weeks anyway' never got hold (that would have probably resulted in some accountant fraud I guess, the way they set up the contract). So anyway, nobody was willing to invest this 2 weeks refactoring that would almost instantly pay itself back.
We were writing channels all the time, and it always felt like such a waste.
Sometimes in corporations, you can end up in the most crazy situations. I've seen plenty.