No, I worked with Ann Marie to get this published, we do not pay our writers. I'm actually surprised she didn't need to put the IBM disclaimer on it ;) But this is her sharing some best practices from her team.
I completely agree. On one hand, it's absolute insanity... but then if you think about how we (I) learned systems, it was by exploration. I typed things in that little back box called "terminal"... sometimes I broke things, then I would search on the Internet for a solution... I would try that, usually breaking things further. But ultimately it was a great learning process.
I've known Charlie and the Penn Manor Technology team for about two years now, and what they are doing is absolutely fantastic. I think they need more support from the software engineering disciplines.
After attending a session with James Pearce at DevNation earlier this year (April), I was really impressed with the open source efforts Facebook is pursuing. It's pretty cool to see how far they've come so fast and the ToDo initiative looks exciting.