dude: hey could you hand me a patch cable ?

me: how long?

dude: as short as possible

me: sure buddy

😂😂

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Context: We have a 96-port wall-mount patch panel. We're not even using half of those ports. "We" (read: "I") are completely redoing our network rack, as it's an ancient nest of wires. Currently all the ports in use on the patch panel just have random-length cables which are just drooped down beside the rack before running to switches. When I need to trace a cable from patch panel to switch, it's a complete nightmare. However, the cables going to the patch panel do have enough of extra length to do a rack-mount patch panel. I suggest this...

MGR: "Ehhh... I don't really like the idea of tying the rack to the wall... What if we want to move it or something?"
(this rack is in a tiny room and has been there since probably the 1800's.)
ME: "Well the problem currently is that it's all but impossible to trace cables. And even if I rewire it and bundle them nicely, it will still be a headache. With a rack-mount panel, we could just have super short patch cables and so it's super easy when I need to move stuff around."
MGR: "Okkkk..... So what if we would purchase like 3 or 4 switches to get 96 ports, then we run a cable to every patch panel port. That way we never need to change anything :)))."

Dude. Great idea. Let's drop hundreds to thousands of dollars on switches we don't need, rather than just doing a single patch panel. Brilliant. Also another great idea that, running thirty or forty unnecessary cables that we aren't even using. That won't clutter up the rack or use up valuable space or get confusing which ports on the switches are/aren't in use.

I'm trying so hard not to scream right now. I can't deal with this.

EDIT: It gets worse. Apparently part of the reason he wants to do this is "to make it simple". Currently we have our POS system running to its own switch, the printers are on another switch, etc. (yes I know some of this could be accomplished with a VLAN, this was set up before my time). But apparently "if we just had every single port wired then we could plug in whatever we want wherever we want and it wouldn't matter." I just... That's... That's not how you do a network.

Only wanted to patch one cable!