I saw this happen once and the developer responded by gradually and deliberately making the code base as cryptic and hard to understand as possible.

Then he quit and development on the product essentially stalled.

Some part of me thinks that maybe programmers who have been royally screwed should take this route. It would offend my sense of professional pride to deliberately create a mess, but I can see the benefits of discouraging business managers from royally screwing the programmer.

That guy created a lot of programmer jobs, too. The project could easily have been a much higher quality and developed at twice the velocity with just 2 people if done right. Instead that code base ended up feeding 12 people's families.