The discussion of "coding for other people" shouldn't apply to start-ups, but I recall being bitten by this around 2001 or so. We were in a VC-backed startup an

The discussion of "coding for other people" shouldn't apply to start-ups, but I recall being bitten by this around 2001 or so. We were in a VC-backed startup and the VCs kept pushing us to rent their pet architects to "help us scale." That's right, we take their invested money and spend it on them, diluting ourselves into oblivion. Any ways, said architects wanted us to rewrite everything in a buzzword-compliant fashion, J2EE, the whole works. Their reasoning? They wouldn't be able to sell our company to IBM unless our code was IBM-compliant. Happy days indeed.