Dealing with ejecting team members from a project.

Just wondering what experiences you folks might have with dealing with this -- the fallout from dealing with code they were working on that nobody else had touched yet, finding out they made revisions to sections outside that which they were assigned without telling anyone, yadda, yadda, ditto, ditto...

I mean, the firing part, I'm good with that... password rotates, back-end checks, security revisions back to a known clean codebase for the website it is hosted on -- but the cleanup of the project itself is something else entirely.

Basically on one of my projects I had to leave in others hands while working on a higher paying gig, and I come back after a few months happy with the functionality changes/improvements -- but the codebase is a broken mess of typo's, breaking multiple bits of functionality, and a general train wreck of how not to write JavaScript AND violating many of the principles and objectives of the project.

I'm basically stuck doing a full audit top to bottom. Suddenly VERY glad the codebase has a 48k hard ceiling.

I know a lot of it is that I took my hands off the wheel, so in a way I only have myself to blame -- but good gravy I never thought things would go off the rails so blasted quick or so spectacularly. Bugger even banjaxed the bloody testing system so it was constantly testing six revisions back instead of the ACTUAL current/dev copy! I'm half wondering if this was intentional to hide how badly they were screwing up...

But you know the saying about not mixing friendship with business? Yeah, that. Things were said that can't be taken back.

I don't know if I'm even actually asking anything, or just venting. Just thinking that other people's tales of woe might cheer me up.