Exactly! There seemed to be a severe lack of any production control processes at this place. That's the fault of management and senior developers/architects. Contractors should never be given the keys to the kingdom like that. And if they are, then there should be some checks and balances to make sure they don't do something foolish like this. But I've worked at places like this where we coded "close to the wire" so to speak and it's just get the job done and who cares about quality. Management should absolutely get the blame when a screw-up happens.
I am not sure how a non-technical director is supposed to hire a software engineer if software engineers themselves fail to hire good software engineers.