I've played sports my entire life (father was a basketball coach), and in that world these sorts of "rites of passage" are common place. I've also seen a bit of this at software companies -- for instance at Facebook I got the feeling that a lot of engineers felt simpatico as a result of the shared "suffering" that went into the tedious interview process.

My experiences led me to believe that, while this can be effective, it only works on certain classes of people. That is, I think a person needs a certain amount of naïveté to be drawn in by schemes like this. They need to already be willing to buy into some litany of conquest and glory. To be young and/or dumb.

Perhaps it is an innate human tendency to form stronger bonds under these conditions; but it's certainly not expressed equally throughout all phases of life, circumstances, and the population at large. I'd be very wary of attempting to exploit it by constructing rituals for a software team.