A long time ago I helped a company get their payment terminal up and running after their first consultant had spent 9 months and $30,000 not getting anything done. The code I got was astonishingly bad and I realized that these folks had no way of evaluating good or bad code, and it depressed me that this was more the 'normal' situation rather than the 'unusual' sort of situation. I hope that in today's target rich environment folks are investing a bit more care into these things but I worry that isn't the case.
