I see nothing concerning in what you've described, except that they are totally at your mercy for whether you are delivering what you describe. EVERYONE will s

I see nothing concerning in what you've described, except that they are totally at your mercy for whether you are delivering what you describe. EVERYONE will say that the code is clean, maintainable, and has documentation that is meaningful for the next programmer to come along. Not everyone will be lying about that, and if I made it sound that way, my apologies. But if the next programmer comes along and says the code is a mess and poorly documented, the company is STILL not sure what's true. Is this next programmer the one with an issue? Was the original not stating the truth? Are both fine and this is a philosophical difference of approach? You can ask around...but you have no real way to judge the comments you get, and they have all the incentives to create misleading info. There's a power imbalance. I'm not saying consultancy is evil, and I'm not saying the power imbalance is avoidable, but in the context of the article - I'm not a big fan of encouraging the _furtherance_ of such a power imbalance, because once you get in, there's very little means of getting out.