I actually thought I was pretty clear. Although it could have been a vindictive act, the programmer claimed to have been robbed, losing his main laptop and his backup server. Once he was replaced he didn't give a shit about any of the jobs he had done for us and no way was he redoing the program for free after it was "stolen". The fact that he refused to hand over the code was one of the reasons we decided to bring programming in-house. Not only would he not hand over the code but like most programmers he was not as good as he thought he was and charged for every minute of time he spent working on a job fixing his own issues because his code was far from clean.

Tweeterguy's description was spot on in relation to this guy and frankly most of the programmers we had ever used. The in-house guy turned out to be great but boy is he the exception rather than the rule.