The worst API ever made (2014)
About 7 years ago I was in a meeting with a former Windows core graphics engineer.My team was attempting to figure out some extremely obtuse workflows with MediaFountain and DirectX.We had a meeting with this guy and a couple of the other engineers that wrote the APIs and the implementation underneath.This particular guy literally chuckled as we aired our frustrations and this was his response:“Yeah you won’t figure those APIs out from the documentation.  It was on purpose.  You have to go buy the book.”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.Apparently many of these guys made 10-20x their salaries on this grift and it didn’t really stop until the mid 2000’s.