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I don't think it's bad posting this to Dzone. I think it's fair to say there are some developers who do this. There are also bad clients though.

Thanks Whiskeyjack. I agree on the client part - there's a lot of folks out there that are jerks.

I'm personally dealing with this fellow at my company that is sandbagging on a critical piece of software for our clients. Basically, he is a really old school programmer with very limited skills (and not interested in updating them) but he is generally reliable and so has been trusted with orchestrating a system for recovery of this critical piece of our application. I have been tasked with being this guy's second in case of the dreaded "hit by a bus" scenario. At first I thought I was just dense the first few times I had to organize and execute a recovery using his process. Now I know that he has decided this critical area is where he would entrench himself to make himself indispensable. I am currently writing some code that will take his manually intensive, procedural and SQL based 'system' and turn it into a one touch, flexible recovery system. So far it has been a nightmare. Asking this guy even basic questions turns into a half hour diatribe punctuated by long irrelevant tangents which he very well knows I don't have time for. I have resorted to using basic specs and original requirement documents to re-build a sane system from scratch. So it is not just clients that get held hostage, but all of us that feel the pain of one of these burrowers when they lodge themselves in an organization or a project and the process can be quite a bit more insidious then the 'pay me or your web site gets it' scenario.

It's important for both sides to draw up a binding agreement that both parties can live with and fulfill. The guiding principle on such agreements should be 'whatever advantage can be taken will be taken'.