Actually he fulfilled his most important purpose perfectly.
What he was brought in for to begin with was because the three of us working on the project semi-long-term had finally all agreed (or, the other guys finally agreed with me--but I was just the UX guy, what did I know?) that we had chosen the wrong web platform in the beginning by selecting some enterprisey Java thing that none of us had used before and that now was the time to correct our mistake and port the web portion to RoR, which two of us knew pretty well. The idea of a port made the business founder nervous, and she wanted someone to tell her it was ok.
So in a conference call, architecture guy hedged and spoke in generalities and tentatively endorsed the developer consensus, which was the best he could have done if he'd been the greatest hacker on earth, since business founder was being silly about protecting the idea and wouldn't tell him what exactly we were doing or let him look at the code base.
It wasn't until after the important decision was made that he signed an NDA and produced the bad code. So I wasn't impressed with architecture guy, but (without knowing how much we paid him) I'd say he did little lasting harm and at the critical point he did nothing in the appropriate way to allow business founder to trust her developers' decision.
What he was brought in for to begin with was because the three of us working on the project semi-long-term had finally all agreed (or, the other guys finally agreed with me--but I was just the UX guy, what did I know?) that we had chosen the wrong web platform in the beginning by selecting some enterprisey Java thing that none of us had used before and that now was the time to correct our mistake and port the web portion to RoR, which two of us knew pretty well. The idea of a port made the business founder nervous, and she wanted someone to tell her it was ok.
So in a conference call, architecture guy hedged and spoke in generalities and tentatively endorsed the developer consensus, which was the best he could have done if he'd been the greatest hacker on earth, since business founder was being silly about protecting the idea and wouldn't tell him what exactly we were doing or let him look at the code base.
It wasn't until after the important decision was made that he signed an NDA and produced the bad code. So I wasn't impressed with architecture guy, but (without knowing how much we paid him) I'd say he did little lasting harm and at the critical point he did nothing in the appropriate way to allow business founder to trust her developers' decision.