A few years back I got heavily into password cracking. As part of it I sniffed a bunch of people's passwords in coffee shops, as well as other black hatty thing

A few years back I got heavily into password cracking. As part of it I sniffed a bunch of people's passwords in coffee shops, as well as other black hatty things that I'm not proud of (though I will say that I learned tremendously from them). While these pattern based passwords work nicely to deter automated systems from grabbing your password after a site compromises your password, they dont stand to the test of human eyes. I had several people's passwords who used similar tactics, it wasn't hard to figure out the pattern. My point here is this: don't rile yourself up about having bulletproof passwords. It's good that you do it, but don't mandate it if you're the head of a company. No password is bulletproof - if someone wants it hard enough, they will get it. Figuring out a pattern based password is only another breadcrumb to follow.