If you talk to employers about what it's like trying to attract and retain IT talent the answer is usually the same - IT'S NEAR FRICKIN' IMPOSSIBLE!! Even if you treat employees right, offer a bucket of cash, unlimited vacation, and a hammock in every cubicle, then only maybe will you attract the talent you want. So, based on this logic, you'd think that employers should treat their employees as best as possible, right? Well, by the looks of things, forum favorite Blakeyrat, found an employer that is lacking in common sense.

How to demoralize employees:

1. Ensure employees have no usernames, as that might unnecessarily make them feel like human beings instead of replaceable automatons. Instead, their Active Directory accounts should be serial numbered. Similarly, make sure their location in the building is referred to as their "grid location". In general, follow prison/concentration camp naming practices at every opportunity.

2. Create a long, involved and unnecessarily complex QA process that takes literally 5+ hours of employee time to go through, even if no bugs are found. Require testing the code in three different environments before it is pushed to prod. Just in case the employee begins to feel that this process is actually useful and necessary, reveal to them that the prod servers are configured entirely differently, and not one of the testing servers matches it.

3. Speaking of QA, don't bother going through the checklists for third-party code, even though that third-party code hosts/manipulates far more critical business data than first-party code. While employees are wasting time checking off the 30-point code quality review, happily deploy third-party code which does critical data manipulations in triggers without wrapping them in transactions or correctly using UPDLOCK hints. Remember: the goal of QA isn't quality software, the goal is to assign blame in case something blows up.

4. Place your employees in a colorless, featureless cubefarm. Mesh chairs? Hah! Have a second group that does virtually identical work, but their employees get standing desks, tons of space, and windows to a beautiful view. Make sure the cubefarm employees have to visit the standing desk employees frequently. Don't provide any creature comforts-- not even free coffee! If an employee brings in their own coffeemaker, explain that this is "against the rules". This can not be restated enough, even if an employee brings in donuts and coffee for an early morning meeting, under no circumstances should they be allowed to expense it!

5. Under no circumstances should developers be allowed to speak to DBAs or change management as if they were actual human beings. All communication should be through tickets. If a ticket is formatted incorrectly, under no circumstances should the DBA or change management employee just fix it themselves, or contact the ticket's creator to resolve-- they should simply delete the ticket so the developer has to start over from scratch. It also doesn't matter if this blows a schedule. Nothing is more important than getting the ticket correct.

6. Speaking of which, use CA Service Desk Manager as your ticketing system. It doesn't matter that it's unusable, cluttered, and plain broken in many fundamental ways. If an employee expects to simply send a URL to link another employee to a ticket, they are foolish and should be punished. Similarly, use PlanView for timecards and generally pick the absolutely worst possible software for all purposes at all times. Also lock the IE version to 8, naturally.

7. Employee computers should be locked-down in the stuffiest and dumbest ways possible. Group policy should ensure that valuable productivity features like browser history, or Office Communicator's conversation history are always turned-off. The desktop background should be locked to the company's logo for literally no good reason. Group Policy should dictate Windows Update settings so that, even if an employee installs software they know for sure is insecure (like a copy of Visual Studio from the original DVD image), they are unable to patch their own computer. Also, turn off UAC by policy-- even if employees want the added protection of UAC on their computers, they're not allowed to turn it back on.