The worst API ever made (2014)
About 7 years ago I was in a meeting with a former Windows core graphics engineer.<p>My team was attempting to figure out some extremely obtuse workflows with MediaFountain and DirectX.<p>We had a meeting with this guy and a couple of the other engineers that wrote the APIs and the implementation underneath.<p>This particular guy literally chuckled as we aired our frustrations and this was his response:<p>“Yeah you won’t figure those APIs out from the documentation.  It was on purpose.  You have to go buy the book.”<p>Proceeded to explain to me that this was how he, and many other core Windows engineers lined their pockets for years - write complex implementations, do the absolute bare minimum documentation, then take a 6 month sabbatical and publish a reference book that was absolutely required to actually use the API.<p>Apparently many of these guys made 10-20x their salaries on this grift and it didn’t really stop until the mid 2000’s.