>The people that expect you to maintain retardedly formatted passwords with stupid character mixtures, and expiration/re-use rules are obstacles, and I like making them as miserable as they make me.
The person on the other end of the phone had nothing to do with it.
For me, as an early stage startup, my devs are actually doing some customer service. I find it has helped our UI/UX immensly because they have to deal with all the problems directly. I actually think it is a great idea to let your developers spend at least a little bit of time each week (or day) doing customer service. It's amazing how much faster little bugs get fixed and processes get streamlined.
My hope is that the ambient animosity seeps through, via high turn-over, leading to increased personnel costs for the organization.
In general, hopefully this uncooperative behavior adds to the general misery distributed throughout the world, and all just because security goons need to feel like they're smarter than the people subject to their policies.
Consider this, oh reader, should you have the opportunity to alter password policies for a project your working on.
The person on the other end of the phone had nothing to do with it.