The surprising thing isn't the policy. The surprising thing is the persistence of the policy even after it's no longer beneficial in any way. It's been more than a decade since Ethernet auto-negotiation became reliable. During that decade, that company has paid for a team to go around and do manually what could have been done by an automated process for a trillionth of the cost. That's a staggering amount of waste.
The policy has to be proven to no longer be beneficial, and I'm pretty sure every major OS has had a way to remotely set the card to a fixed configuration or autoneg since around then, but that's a separate issue.
Thats why policies, like contracts, should never be evergreen. Policies simply amount to internal contracts and any company that does not regularly review and refresh them is doomed to this kind of waste.
like the parent or evergreen? No I have never worked anywhere that promoted such abject waste through "adherence to policy" but I likely would not have chosen to work at such a place to begin with.
