I have seen this before, it does work and there was a very good reason for it.
As you may already know large ceramic capacitors are prone to cracking due to thermal stresses. a capacitor manufacturer (who's name I can no longer remember, something like kemec??) did extensive research and produced white papers that proved that by having smaller pads than the width of the capacitor the stresses on the cap were greatly reduced.
The capacitors solder and are connected and physically held perfectly well with this method. Having had assembly runs in the hundreds of thousands with all ceramic caps having reduced pads no problems were ever found due to the pad dimensions. In fact many previous problems of cracked caps were greatly reduced.
However, this may not be why it was done - it may just be because he got the footprint wrong (I have seen this happen many times, both I and Marce have got footprints wrong before, no one get them right all the time.
)
As your the customer, if the board is still in the design stage then get him to correct it with an IPC-7351B\C footprint, they are easy to make with the free library expert, so I'd expect this correction to take only about 5-10 minutes max.
If however it is too late and the board has gone to the fabricators - dont worry too much about it, a hole will not open in the ground swallowing you all - it will still work.