I know of a C++ programmer who was forced, by management, to write a GUI in VB. You shoulda seen the thing. She built this whole scaffolding to emulate an object-oriented language, and then built the GUI on that. When she left, they hired an honest-to-goodness VB Programmer® to finish it. Heh.
Yeah. Good engineers love a challenge like that, but you rarely get anything you can use. I love managers with more testosterone/estrogen than brains.
I hope the guy in your example didn't get fired. It's like being out of pitchers and having your third basemen volunteer to pitch the ninth, then firing him for losing the game.