“At one point we had 3 interns whose full-time job was writing these SQL statements.”
The Merchants table hit SQL Server’s column limit, so someone built Merchants2 with 500 more. Logins depended on a hand-filled calendar table that an intern extended by five years. Salespeople got their quota wins moved between months with manual SQL until three interns did it full time. Writing an application was deemed too difficult. Interns were cheaper.