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I'm pretty sure there are lots of people in the industry who write unmaintainable code on purpose for their own job security. I don't endorse this, but I've heard horror stories at several well-known companies about instances of this.

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Probably not working very well since the bosses can't care less about the actual technical quality when making decisions. I.e. they don't know or care it's unmaintainable. So you build your fort and get picked off just outside the gates.

It might be revenge though, not job security? Or maybe "organic" local job security, i.e. the colleges of the perpetrator can't take over his tasks easily without management investment?

I guess most bad code is just bad/novice programmers or bad project management.

"I'm the only one who can understand this important code" seems like good job security to me

I worked with a guy like this, long-term contractor at a business institution. Every shell script he did was wrapped in many levels of awk,sed,perl,regex, with no comments whatsoever. And he worked there for 10+ years. At the end it was easier to rewrite his "modules" than to maintain them.

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