I thought this was a silly joke at first, but it's actually sort-of an attempt to capture actual organizational anti-patterns. I mean at some level assigning an

I thought this was a silly joke at first, but it's actually sort-of an attempt to capture actual organizational anti-patterns. I mean at some level assigning an "immaturity level" is silly. However, characterizing various pathologies of bad organizations is helpful. I think I've actually worked in organizations that were at level -3. Sometimes this was a reasonable goal taken to an absurd extreme. For example, a reasonable Software Quality Engineering organization's goal would be to find as many bugs as possible in the software product, or in short, to try to "break" the product. Taken to an extreme, the ability of an SQE organization to exaggerate any concern about quality to such an extent that it manages to stop the shipment of the product because of quality concerns, can be construed as a success for that SQE organization. In the case I'm thinking of, the SQE org was basically obstructionist, because they got rewarded for that. It was amazing that we managed ever to ship anything.