As much as we all like to believe otherwise, information hoarding can work. At best it's a risky strategy, since clearly information hoarding is inherently selfish, and people will probably get angry if they catch you.
As an aside, you might be wondering "how could anyone possibly not get caught?" However, I've witnessed people that hoard information from the technical staff but pretend to management that they are cooperating. But all information sharing is in fact deliberately incomprehensible or false.
This doesn't fool the technical staff for long, but it does make it hard to prove, and anyone in position to information hoard has probably been around longer and therefore has more trust from management. Especially since they are in position to create a story of themselves heroically saving project after project from successive waves of programmers that can never seem to get the system to work right.
Information hoarding is especially effective if the information being hoarded includes a lot of the actual system requirements, since technical employees can eventually figure out even the most obscure code given enough time. But doing all that plus determining the requirements takes even longer, and will be almost impossible to do without it getting back to the information hoarder.
Obviously, it requires bad management to let such a situation to develop, and to let it continue, but even in this day and age there are still a very small number of companies with a single department or two that in their very worst moments allow occasional bad management.
Interestingly, for the information hoarder life as a miser is often pretty tough. They probably can't improve their skill set because they are busy being essential to whatever their hoarded information pertains to. Soon they can't change jobs because that's all they really know how to do. And they have to live in fear of new management with sense enough to see what's going on and the guts to pay the short term costs of fixing the problem.
So, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't unethical and desperate. But under some circumstances it can provide more job security then not doing it. But less career security.