How to demoralize employees: A guide for bad companies

This guide is a translation with minor artistic variations of the opus with The Daily WTF ( How To Demoralize Employees: A DIY Guide for Terrible Companies ).

1. Make sure that employees do not have easily recognizable by unauthorized logins. Forget about iivanov or vpupkin and other recommendations of newfangled trends. This may allow employees to feel like people, not the human resources of your respectable company! Accounts in Active Directory must be serial numbers according to the “grid location”. Make sure that the logins match the location - the building number, floor, workplace. In general, follow the clear and convenient naming rules adopted in prisons / concentration camps - because it works great there!
2. Create a long, rigorous and complex QA process that takes about 5 hours of work time to pass all tests, even if no errors are detected. Require verification of the code in at least three different environments before it is sent to merge to the production branch. Just in case, if the employee suddenly starts to feel that this process is really useful and necessary, show him that the production server is configured in a completely different way. In general, none of the test servers does not correspond to it.
3. Speaking of QA. Do not bother checking the 3rd-party code. Even if this code is used to process more important business data than the main application code. While your employees spend time checking all 30 items related to the style and quality of the main code, quietly add third-party libraries and plugins that perform critical manipulations with data without transactions or correctly using UPDLOCK recommendations.
   
   Remember: the meaning of QA is not software quality. The main point of their existence is for someone to blame for all the bumps if something goes wrong.
4. As an increase in concentration exclusively at work, provide a group of your employees with a colorless, faceless cubic open space. And to the second group, which performs almost identical tasks, arrange modern standing tables, huge empty spaces and windows with a beautiful view. Make sure that employees of the first cubofarm regularly visit employees of the second group. But do not provide any comfort for these creatures - not even free coffee! If your workers bring their coffee, explain that this is breaking the rules. No coffee and donuts for the early morning meeting! It does not matter that the second group appears in the office only for dinner.
5. Under no circumstances should application developers talk to database administrators or have access to database management as if they were real people. All messages must pass through the tickets in the bugtracker. If the ticket is filled incorrectly - neither the administrator nor the manager should be able to correct it on their own or contact the one who created it - they should simply delete / close the ticket marked “design error” in order for the developer to fill in the correct ticket from scratch. And even if it leads to a violation of deadlines - it does not matter. Nothing is more important than properly designed tickets!
6. Since we started talking about it, use the most reliable (proven by decades of work), albeit a cumbersome Desk Manager, which you will find. It does not matter that the system is old, cluttered and generally fundamentally resentful for agile development. All fields should use plain text checked over the years, preventing the creation of tables or clickable elements. If an employee thinks that you can simply take and send a link to the ticket to another employee, it means that he must be punished for this stupid! Naturally, the browser on all working machines should be locked to Internet Explorer version 8.
7. And in general, the rights to all work computers should be stabbed in the most reliable and soulless ways. Group Policy should ensure that useless things, such as browser history or Office Communicator chat history, are always turned off. The desktop background should be blocked from changing and installed on a very high resolution company logo (perhaps this will be the only bright and attractive element of the entire workplace), without being able to turn it off even for a remote connection. Group Policy should prohibit the user to install any software, and consider it unsafe. And even the IT service should not be able to install allowed software from a well-defined list until at least three new versions of this product come out to consider it sufficiently proven in the business.

PS Almost every item in one form or another was seen in real companies. True, otherwise it would not be so funny sadly (your choice).