Oh gawd. Company I'm with outsourced an EJB application to an Indian company that, apparently, didn't know any more than we did about Java. Deliverable: yesterday, I saw a 400-line class that coulda been reduced to maybe 10 lines of code if anyone had known what the hell they were doing.

(a) Outsourcing to an organization that didn't have a clue about our product. I wasn't involved directly, usually, but my involvement *still* featured endless time-wasting meetings while we tried to overcome culture differences and backgrounds. Not only did we get crap code, they never really "got" it.

(b) Not learning from previous mistakes (e.g., this company had done similar with a Visual Basic application, hiring consultants who were really learning-on-the-job and delivered a piss-poor badly documented (har, documentation?) shit.)

(c) Few programmers in this company learned anything about the applications in either (a) or (b); more like we got crappy code and didn't know enough to properly evaluate it as crap until *we* devoted more resources to the code than we would have had to than if we'd developed it ourselves. Or if we'd had *real* Java or Visual Basic experts developing it, not just wannabes.

we have an extensive API of our own for manipulating the application data and building our web-based pages. Apparantly he had never see this done before... :-/

Recipe for disaster, IMO, but then what do I know? (the only thing I know is how much I don't know. :=( :=)

The idea that the concept of an API would be foreign to anyone doing any sort of programming during the past ten or fifteen years.

Home-built API's, or libraries, or whatever your terminology is - well, you want to avoid duplicating someone else's work, but there's frequently room for your own layers. Curses is a standard Unix terminal library, but I'm not sure I'd want to use the bare-bones library.