Ask Lemmy

The company would bid on government contracts, knowing full well they promised features that didn’t exists and never would, but calculating that the fine for not meeting the specs was lower than the benefit of the contract and getting the buyers locked into our system. I raised this to my boss, nothing changed and I quit shortly after.

Our business-critical internal software suite was written in Pascal as a temporary solution and has been unmaintained for almost 20 years. It transmits cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests. They also use a single decade-old Excel file to store vital statistics. A key part of the workflow involves an Excel file with a macro that processes an HTML document from the clipboard.

I offered them a better solution, which was rejected because the downtime and the minimal training would be more costly than working around the current issues.

i worked for a hybrid hosting and cloud provider that was partnered with Electronic Arts for the SimCity reboot.

well half way through they decided our cloud wasn’t worth it, and moved providers. but no one bothered to tell all the outsourced foreign developers that they were on a new provider architecture.

all the shit storm fail launch of SimCity was because of extremely shitty code that was meant to work on one cloud and didn’t really work on another. but they assumed hurr hurr all server same.

so you guys got that shit launch and i knew exactly why and couldn’t say a damn thing for YEARS

I quit a well known ecomm tech company a few months ago ahead of (another) one of their layoff rounds because upper mgmt was turning into ultra-wall street corpo bullshit. With 30% of staff gone, and yet our userbase almost doubling over the same period, they wanted everyone to continue increasing output and quality. We were barely keeping up with our existing workload at that point, burnout was (and still is) rampant.

Over the two weeks after I gave my notice I discovered that in the third-party app ecosystem many thousands of apps that had (approved) access to the Billing API weren't even operating anymore. Some had quit operating years ago, but they were still billing end-users on a monthly basis. Many end-users install dozens of apps (just like people do with mobile phones) and then forget they ever did so. The monthly rates for these apps are anywhere from 3 to 20 dollars per month, many people never checked their bank statements or invoices (when they eventually did, they'd contact support to complain about paying for an app that doesn't even load and may not have for months or years at this point).

I gathered evidence on at least three dozen of these zombie apps. Many of them had hundreds of active installs, and were billing users for in some cases the past three years. I extrapolated that there were probably in the high-hundreds or low-thousands of these zombie apps billing users on the platform, amounting to high-thousands to low-tens-of thousands of installs... amounting to likely millions per year in faulty and sketchy invoicing happening over our Billing API.

Mgmt actually did put together a triage team to address my findings, but I can absolutely assure you the only reason they acted so quickly is because I was on the way out of the company. I'd spotted things like this in the wild previously and nothing had ever been done about it. The pat answer has always been well people are responsible for their own accounts and invoicing. I believe they acted on this one because I was being very vocal about how it would be 'a shame' if this situation ever became public, and all those end-users came after the company for those false invoices at one time. It would be a PR and Support nightmare.

You have definitely interacted with this ecommerce platform if you shop online.

Big german TV production company with succesful primetime action series used rented cars for their stunts. Different people from the team rented them with full insurance, returned them crashed. They did this until every car rent in the city stopped offering insurance without retention.

I worked for for the railroad. Nothing is fixed ever. I witnessed hundreds of code violations every day for years. Doesn't matter if a rail car or locomotive meets code as long as it "can travel" its good to go.

When an employee inspector finds a defective rail car management determines if it will get fixed. If the supervisor "feels" like "it's not that bad" then the rail car is "let go".

Health insurance company I worked for would automatically reject claims over a certain amount without reviewing them. Just to be dicks and make people have to resubmit. This was over 25 years ago, but it's my understanding many health insurers still pull this shit. They don't care if it's legal or not. Enforcement is lazy and fines are cheaper than medical claims.

Obviously this is in the USA.

1-800-got-junk? doesn't care at all about its environmental impact. No sorting what so ever happens to what goes on their trucks it all goes to landfills. All the ads will say they recycle and that they repurpose old furniture but I was threatened with being fired when I recommended donating antiques instead of dumping a load of furniture.

More jobs and more profits comes before anything else in that company, including employee health and safety. Several times I was told to enter spaces we werent trained for (attics and crawl spaces) and carry waste I legally couldn't transport (human/organic wastes and the laws states the driver is fined, not the company). One guy injured his shoulder during an attic job and was told to finish the shift or lose his job. Absoulte scum of a company with very sleazy management and possibly the labour board in their pocket as they kept "losing the files" when I tried to file a report with buddy's shoulder (he was hesistant to report for fear of losing his job).

I used to work for a popular wrestling company, billionaire owner, very profitable, would write off any OSHA penalties as the 'cost of doing business' just as they did in 1998, when The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table

It's pretty depressing, but the fact that soil and groundwater are almost certainly contaminated anywhere that humans have touched. I've seen all kinds of places from gas stations, to dry cleaners, to mines, to fire stations, to military bases, to schools, to hydroelectric plants, the list could go on, and every last one of them had poison in the ground.

Geek Squad, We were flying under the radar upgrading Macbook RAM, until one day we became officially Apple Authorized to fix iPhones, which means we were no longer allowed to upgrade Macbook RAM since the Macbooks were older and considered "obsolete" by apple, meaning we were unable to repair or upgrade the hardware the customer paid for, simply because apple said it was "too old". it was at this point in my customer interaction, that we recommend a repair shop down the road that isn't held at gunpoint by apple ;)

There is a million times more counterfeit/fake items at amazon than you think, and they dont care one bit to fix the problem

Anybody knows that one waterfall attraction in the Southeast US? The one that advertises bloody everywhere? Waterfall is pumped during the dry seasons, otherwise there'd be nothing to see. Lots of the formations are fake, and the Cactus and Candle formation was either moved from a different spot in the cave, or is from a different cave in New Mexico. Management doesn't want people to know that, but fuck 'em.

The buildings alarm code was 0711. Guess where I worked....

The programming team that is working hard on your project is just one dude and he smells funny. The programming team you’ve met in your introductory meeting are just the two unpaid interns that will be fired or will quit within the next two months and don’t know what’s happening. We don’t do agile despite advertising it. Also your project being a priority means it’ll be slapped together from start to finish 24 hours prior to the deadline. Oh and there will be extra charges to fix anything that doesn’t work as it should.

I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with "bombast". They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word "infinity". Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you're a Bombast customer, you're helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.

Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.

I worked for a furniture store. They used to buy mattresses and furniture sets for like $200-300 and arbitrarily sell them for around $700-1000. I used to be able to haggle with people and still sell them for like double what they cost. I hated that job for so many reasons

Worked at a globally popular fast food francise many years ago. They had collection boxes for a charity that they raised money for. None of the money went to that charity, but was divided between owners and managers.

An AI company... They used to manually change system event logs to show it wasn't their software that caused the downtime for our clients.

Bought over a million dollars worth hardware (25% of which didn't even got racked), over 200 46inch LED screens that no one used, and very expensive offices at posh locations in the bid to increase its IPO valuation.

I worked for an online payment company you all know. Many eployees have access to the main DB which holds all transactions and names and everything in clear text. You could basically find out all PII (personal identification information) of any celebrity you wanted given they had anaccount. Address, phone number, credit card and all. If you knew a bit of SQL you could basically find whoever person you wanted and get purchase history and all.

Cant say I didnt use this to find stuff about my exes or various celebrities.

Over a decade ago I worked as a freelancer for an Investment Bank (the largest one that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash, which was a few years later) were the head of the Proprietary Trading Desk (the team of Traders who invest for the profit of the bank) asked me if I could change the software so that they could see the investments of the Client Trading Desk (who invest for clients with client money) was making, with the assent of the latter team.

Now if the guys investing money for the bank know what they guys investing customer money are doing they can do things like Front-Run the customer trades (or serve them at exactly the right price to barelly beat the competiotion) thus making more profits for the bank and hence get bigger bonuses. This is why Financial regulations say that there is supposed to be so-called Chinese Walls between the proprietary trading and the customer trading activities: they're supposed to be segregated and not visible to each other.

Note that the heads of both teams were mates and already regularly had chats, so they might already have been exchanging this info informally.

I was quite fresh in there (less than 1 year) and the software system I worked in at the time was used by both teams, but when I started looking into it I saw that the separation was very explicitly coded in software and that got me thinking about what I had learned from the mandatory compliance training I had done when I first joined (so, yeah, that stuff is not totally useless!!!)

So I asked for written confirmation from the heads of both teams, and just got some vague response e-mails, no clear "do such and such".

So I played the fool and took it to a seperate team called Compliance (responsible for compliance with financial regulations) saying I just wanted to make sure it was all prim and proper, "just in case".

Of course, it kinda blew up (locally) and I ended up called to a meeting with the heads of the Prop Desk and whatnot - all stern looks and barelly contained angry tones - were I kept playing the fool.

Ultimatelly it ended up not being a problem for me at all, to the point that after that bank went bust and its component parts were sold to another bank, the technical team manager asked me to come back to work with the same IT group (remember, I was a freelancer) with even greater responsabilities, so this didn't exactly damage my career.

That said, over the years there were various cases of IT guys in large investment banks who went along with "innocent" requests from the Traders and ended up as the fall-guys for subsequent breaking of Finance Regulations, serving jail time, so had I gone along with that request I would've actually risked ending up in jail.

(Financial Regulators were and are a complete total joke when it comes to large banks, which actually makes it more likely that some poor techie guy will be made the fall guy to protected the bank and its heads).

The first steel mill I worked for, the test requirements were more of a suggestion than a rigid specification. I, a trained and skilled engineer with the capacity to make informed decisions, had to run all rejections by my boss who would tell me "it's close enough" even if it wasn't. Sometimes it bit us in the ass with warranty failures, but the warranties were probably cheaper than internal rejections (and what is brand perception worth?).

My second steel mill job, I was the one making the rejection decisions. I did the hard thing and rejected our failures but I also troubleshot them to prevent recurrence, making our product and capability better over time.

It very much matters who you buy your steel from; two mills can have vastly different performance for the same products based on how they handle these situations.

I work in IT. Most systems have laughable security. Passwords are often saved in plain text in scripts or config files. I went to a site to help out a very large provincial governmental organization move some data out of one system and into another. They sat me down with a loaner laptop and the guy logged me into his user account on the server. When I asked for escalated privileges, he told me he'd go get someone who knew the service account passwords.

After a few minutes, I started poking around on my own... And had administrative access within an hour. I could read the database (raw data), access documents, start and stop the software, plus, figured out how to get into the upstream system that fed data to this server... I was working on figuring out the software's admin password when the guy came back. I'm sure that given some more time, I could have rooted the box because the OS hadn't been updated in years.

I worked with people from many indian IT companies who just outright clone github repos and tell clients they developed the entire thing from scratch.

Acronis Backup charges you for local data backups from one device to the other. So basically if you are using Acronis to move data from your local drive to another local device like a NAS, you pay money for every gigabyte transferred. During the time I worked for them, the script to run the transfer was literally the most simple robocopy command, even simpler than one you could write yourself. And they still do it, charge for local to local data movement. Its fucking insane. One of my clients had a $15k a month bill for local data movement. Straight up highway robbery.

I worked as a pastor and professor for a global, evangelical television ministry/college. They knowingly conceal scholarship on the Bible and punish their pastors for asking any questions that undermine their most closely held traditions (including anti-evolution, mental illness is supernatural, etc.). They tell their US viewers that they can't call themselves Christians if they don't vote Republican, while still enjoying tax-exempt status. They use pseudohistorians to inspire Christian Nationalism over their network, and are one of the largest propaganda networks for the Religious Right. A U.S. Capitol police commander told me his men were fighting people who were wearing the network's brand.

This local single location grocery store by my house would unwrap and rewrap meat packages when it hit expiration dates in order to generate a new label with a new expiration date. If the meat looked bad, it would be added to the meat grinder to make ground beef.

Office Depot sells printers at very low (or even negative) margin, and then inflates the margins on cables, paper, ink, and warranty. If you want the best deal, get the printer from OD, and everything else you need somewhere else. That $20 USB cable they sell costs them $1 and you can get the same or better online for $2.68.

Worked support for an electricity supplier. I was able to see a frightening amount of info about the customers. Even past ones who had moved elsewhere.

We also kept notes about each call, email, web or app chat. So if you were an asshole in the past, everyone will know going forward.

Also fuck landlords and landladies etc. More often than not, they were shitty to deal with.

Also we would often use Google Maps and Streetview to see what your house looked like. We also had pictures of the inside because the installation techs took pictures to confirm that works were completed as specified.

Alll of this was available to us for any reason, at any time with no oversight. And none of it was encrypted. There was also government websites in use up to 2020 that required internet explorer to use and had passwords as trivial as 'Password1'.

I left that job because the pay was lousy and the stress was pretty full on. I respected a lot of people that worked there. Both higher ups and people who came after me. But fuck was there a lot of potential for bad actors or like stalkers etc to mess with your info.

I would reccomend to everyone. Please use password managers. Especially decent open source ones like Bitwarden. Take note of every piece of info that you give a company. From your phone number, address, email etc to even when you contacted them. Also try to not have your home look like an abandoned hovel on Streetview lol. Easier said than done I know. But it may affect your dealings with support people that you need help from. And lastly, please dont use Password1 as a login. Ever. Like please.

Worked in tech support for a satellite based Internet company that oversold its bandwidth on one of the satellites.

We told customers on that beam we were working on it. The actual solution was attrition. Eventually enough customers would quit that service would be better for those that remained.