It’s always really funny when “security” companies have a centralized DB that grants tons of employees permissions to browse it. What were they thinking?
There are certainly some important lessons for us to learn here but, just for clarity, this wasn't one of them. The data access in question here was central to the individual's daily job responsibilities and done through systems explicitly built for this purpose.
I like your honest tone and upfront attitude. As someone who left the industry because of this type of thinking I’d like to say it’s half-correct.
Patterns and anti-patterns are something which help make useful software. Not only architecture patterns like MVP or MVVM, but design patterns like a factory or builder etc.
It’s my belief there are also developer patterns and anti-patterns. The slacker pattern isn’t an anti-pattern, but often can incur the team pattern of daily iteration vs. bursts of work.
Most of what you’re discussing seems slated towards the anti-pattern of “words without code”. Which personally I believe is also an anti-pattern. The code must come, otherwise it’s not work, right?
But when you talk about these people “they hate tests” “doesn’t want to do X and Y perfunctory thing” your team isn’t presenting the value of those things first and foremost. Have you tried putting a “sheep” and a “slacker” together?
Could have been much worse.