I've come across this a few times. The managers' thoughts were probably along the lines of "great, I got all my code cleaned up/the hard part of my product buil

I've come across this a few times. The managers' thoughts were probably along the lines of "great, I got all my code cleaned up/the hard part of my product built for the expensive rate, now I can fire him and pass on maintenance to the cheap guys over there". And of course your thoughts were "I'm going to work extra hard initially, which will make a good impression and get the product built on time and all the tasks automated, and then I can coast and it will still be worth their money." The manager doesn't care because when your code starts rotting due to bad maintenance and badly added features (or just the fact that nobody has bothered taking it over), he'll already have been promoted or changed companies.