I currently inhabit a high-walled cube in a small group (4) in a small shop (30 - 40) in an insurance company in the midwest US. My group makes my job fantastic as we all have the same work ethic and we all help each other when needed. We don't fraternize outside the office much but we all get along quite well. Our manager doesn't mind 'getting his hands dirty' because he makes a point of learning what we do and he gets involved bit not too much! Plus, there is no finger pointing here and thankfully our manager buffers us from the politics.

But, our culture here in the user areas is pretty antiquated and somewhat old-fashioned. Lots of realtives work here (yikes!) and management styles are, well, archaic. Lots of micro managing, disrespectful bantering and the like between the user areas. Hopefully, a new CEO coming in a year will amend some of this.

The worst IT shop had to be at either a municipal city office (no budget and old technology) or at a large HMO support office that didn't know how to plan and everyone treated each other horribly (it consisted of a lot of NE transplants to the south - not a good outcome).

I once worked at a small software company in this same building and it was great as they had 1) a panoramic view of downtown 2) free snacks 3) great owners and co-workers and 4) free in-house MS training. Alas, 9/11 ended all that.