One of the best ever work environments I had the pleasure to experience was at my last employer, when I first started.

At that time, me and two other new guys all started at the same time, and we were assigned their lead developer to on-board us into the environment. It was all new stuff to all of use (especially the other two guys - one was fresh out of uni, the other had never had a full-time office job - only contract work). I had only regular web-dev experience (front and back end) - but this was completely new to me.

It was server automation and management, for a hosting company. The stack was a combination of PHP mixed with Java and shell scripting. They wanted to move into cloud hosting services (VPS) - so our task was to learn the system, maintain it where necessary, and also transition things over to (ultimately) an OpenStack/OpenCloud environment (while keeping the old stuff still going, of course). It was being thrown to the wolves, because we had to get this all done in a very short time frame.

Unfortunately, they had no where to seat us in the small office - except one spot: The conference room they had interviewed us in. This was a small 9 x 12 room, with a single door, and a glass wall.

They brought in a desk system, and set up the machines (well, we set them up). We got to work. It was hot inside, because the AC had no vent into the room (and we're in Phoenix, Arizona which didn't help). We called the room - initially - the "oven". It was miserable - so we all had fans. We turned off the lights. Just the glow of the monitors to light the room.

The lead - he set up spotify and would run his music (or whatever) and we would listen. I was the old guy (I'm in my 40s) - so the music was new to me, but I liked it. It was a crazy mix of Kesha, some kind of pirate metal, dubstep, Dragonforce, and other weirdness. I loved the mix. We hacked to that, and I gained an appreciation for music I had never experienced before.

Eventually we got our first mascot - someone drew a dickbutt on the glass next to the door, with a flower coming out the rear. Awesome. Described our stack perfectly (I eventually cranked out a fake O'Reilly "book" for the stack) - when it worked, it worked great, but most of the time it was a dickbutt and there was nothing we could do about it (most of those problems were on the server side, which we could only barely touch because our IT guy wasn't the most personable, and held total control over the 10k+ servers in the queue).

At another point, our manager decided to rescue us from our oven, and we got a portable A/C unit - vented into the ceiling. That made things bearable - well, until the thing overflow with condensation (nobody told us to empty it). But - the oven became the "barn" in no time. We called it the barn out of a joke involving bronies or something, I dunno.

And...we got a new mascot. Our lead was culturally jewish, and he told us of a tale called "Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins". Apparently this is a real book. Well - to fit into the theme, our new mascot that appeared one day was a hobby horse we named "Hershel". We propped it up on our desk system, added a hat and feather, and continued to work.

We got the system done - well, working to the point that it was real, did what it was supposed to do...

Eventually, the barn was dismantled when we moved to a new office - to an open floorplan (ugh). Too much light. The camaraderie that was developed in our oven barn, while it continued to a certain point - it wasn't quite the same. About a year later, the company was sold, I quit and moved on to other pastures, and the new company eventually got rid of the dev team (because they never wanted it in the first place, nor the software we developed).

But it was a great time while it lasted. Take from it what you can or will...