I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but after reading about burning bridges (and in such a distasteful way), I wonder if it’s more than financial reasons that causes someone to act like that. Regardless of the reason, that last thing is inexcusable.

As for working slowly, that is not always a bad thing. Programmers are often pressured into keeping an unsustainable pace, at the expense of the codebase and its authors. Some of the fastest developers produce far more bugs than working functionality, and are not capable of writing code that will be maintainable. Good architecture, writing tests, build automation, and understanding use cases to catch bugs or gaps in requirements is highly underrated at fast-paced companies. It’s possible to do all of the above and still be fast, but that is sometimes how you burn out your developers; only the best can do it all years-on-end.

I’ve learned many new programming concepts both in and outside of employment in the last 20 years, but one time I did refuse an employer’s request to learn a technology stack. It would put me down a completely different career path that I wasn’t interested in. And the only reason they asked was because they’ve recently fired and/or drove away ALL of the employees with the experience. The company was so desperate to retain their certification, that I was told to cheat on the test if I wasn’t interested in the technology. I voluntarily left the company shortly after.

There you have it. Reasons why 2 of those 3 things might be okay. Probably not in that guy’s case though.