i've posted before about how i did development work for a company whose devs didn't engage with our work until weeks after the fact, when they then had nothing useful to say except "it looks slow" and "how dare you fix issues with your PRs in separate commits". basically my coworker and i were to work for three months on their festering pile of shit that's barely one step above editing files live in production in that it uses version control, but otherwise has no build automation and only sporadically uses dependency management. they put me in charge of setting up and maintaining a live environment for manual testing to take place, and due to the lack of tooling, this involved a lot of manual patching and copying files around.

when the testing began, they opted not to use the issue tracker, but instead had an excel spreadsheet. it was messy and impossible for me to stay on top of things, and having to update the test environment every time we addressed their feedback drove me nuts.

to my surprise, and despite being very vocal about my misgivings working with the company, my boss signed a contract with them for another three months. i was dragged into a meeting with the client to figure out how we could make things easier for me. so i asked if they could be in charge of hosting the test environment this time around, and they agreed.

now, this sounds like a very innocent request on my part, but here's some background: the project in question is something the client maintains out of some contractual obligation, like they get government money for it or something. i knew that aside from the one guy nitpicking about how my code "looks slow", it was obvious they didn't give a fuck about the state of the code. in fact, it was very likely they had never intended for it to run in an environment outside their production server, with hardcoded api urls being one of the things we had to patch when working on it. (env variables? never heard of em)

knowing they had no real interest in the project, and that setting it up is an absolute nightmare, i figured they simply wouldn't be able set up a test environment on their own. sure enough, after we'd done the last of our tasks on the project two months later, we just got radio silence from them. the test environment never came, there was never any rounds of testing done, and we didn't have to address any feedback.

and so today, after a month and a half of not hearing anything, we were removed from their github organisation without a word. i'm happy, my boss is probably happy i'm happy, and the client probably regrets painting themselves into a corner by agreeing to host their own software.