Perfect example of not asking the right questions during an interview. You can usually find out if a place is this jacked without ever joining the payroll if you know what to ask them. Interviews are a two way process. You're interviewing them, just as they're interviewing you.
Ultimately, tales like this (and DailyWTF postings) are "junk food" for the mind. Sure, they may give a smile and easy sense of smug superiority... but do you learn anything?
Don't we already know there are a lot of bad workplaces, a lot of fubar'd codebases, a lot of clueless-muddle-along programmers? Indeed, so many that you could read a sad-funny tale every hour on the hour for the rest of you natural life and not exhaust the FAIL?
But is that a good info-diet?
Or just cheap sugary click candy, fattening one's ego without any mental nutrition?
Sure, some stories are more enlightening than others, and there is a point of diminishing returns. But I think the stories are pretty useful; they provide anecdotal evidence for various development anti-patterns. They imbue an appropriate sense of apprehension whenever someone says "Source control is too complicated." or "Then we serialize the object to an XML text field..." or "A testing environment would cost twice as much."
