Several years ago I worked a contract for (an already at the time) famously shitty publicly traded company. First assignment was writing a utility to be used wh

Several years ago I worked a contract for (an already at the time) famously shitty publicly traded company. First assignment was writing a utility to be used when business units were shut down: deallocating all resources, erasing server data, scorched earth — that’s what they wanted. They refused to pay for any kind of test environment and insisted I build and test on their production network. There was no way I was going to do that (just imagine what it would look like if something went wrong), so I paid for cloud hosting myself. I wrote the utility, tested it thoroughly, and delivered it to the client. We had a very positive code review, and then I gave notice that I’d be terminating the contract early. My non-reimbursed expenses weren’t very much at all, maybe $100 USD at most; it was the principle of the thing combined with a worry for what unprofessional thing they’d demand of me next.