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
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.
The library I worked for as a teen used to process off-site reservations by writing them to a text file, which was automatically e-faxed to all locations every odd day.
If you worked at not-the-main-location, you couldn’t do an off-site reservation, so on even days, you would print your list and fax it to the main site, who would re-enter it into the system.
This was 2005. And yes, it broke every month with an odd number of days.
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.
I’ve worked in IT consulting for over 10 years and have never once lied about the capabilities of a product. I have said, it doesn’t do that natively, but if that’s a requirement we can scope how much it would take to make it happen. Sadly my company is very much the exception.
The worst I saw was years ago I was working on an infrastructure upgrade of a Hyper-V environment. The client purchased a backup solution I wasn’t familiar with but said it supported Hyper-V. It turns out their Hyper-V support was in “beta”. It wasn’t in beta. They were literally using this client as a development environment. It was a freaking joke. At one point I had to get on the phone with one of their developers and explain how high-availability and fail-over worked.
I could very well have been that developer. Usual story, sales promised the world, that our vmware-based system would run on anything and everything, and of course it’s all HA and load balanced, smash cut to me on Monday morning trying to figure out how to make it do that before it goes live on Wednesday.
eh DHCP isn’t really important right? obviously if it hasn’t changed since the 80’s why would you need to reboot your server.
what are vulnerabilities?
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’ve had a few friends work for them out in Montreal, and their parent company (2 Men and a Truck). According to them it’s a mob-operated business.
Oh no! I had a great experience with 2 men and a truck when I he used them! No idea it was associated with the 1 800 junk folks
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.
Some places are insanely polluted to the point where you wonder how a whole company could be so braindead and essentially poison themselves.
A place not far from where I live had a chemical plant which just dumped loads of chemicals on a meadow for years. Now there are ground water pumps installed there which need to run 24/7 so that the chemicals don’t contaminate nearby rivers and hence the rest of the country.
When taking samples from the pumped up water you can smell gasoline.It’s just as depressing when something counts as “clean”. My saddest example was a former sand pit, they spent 30 years digging out 15 meters of sand, then another 30 years filling it with anything from industrial to veterinary waste, “capped” it with rubble in the late 40s and called it clean enough.
Had a bigass job digging out the top 3 meters of random waste, including several thousand of barrels of whatever the fuck. And definitely no unexploded ordnance (spoiler, after finding several ww2 rifle stocks and helmets, the first mortarshells were dug up too). After makimg room, it was covered in sand, clay, bentonite and a protective grid.
So naturally, 3 months after that finished, some cockhead decided to throw an anchor and hit go all ahead flank on his assholes boat and tore the whole thing up. No need to fix anything though, just shovel some more sand it, that’ll stop the anthrax!
This was all in open connection with a major river, of course. One people swim in.
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 ;)
I worked at a 3rd party Apple retailer (they had a legacy contract from the 90s that only expired about 5-10 years ago) and they bought the cheapest RAM they could find to upgrade the Macs. They made hand over fist on RAM upgrades and still came in under what Apple charged for the same upgrade.
Isn’t the ram soldered? Is it too hard to upgrade?
if you have a hot air desoldering station it shouldn’t be too hard. but it’s a tool that most people aren’t going to have on hand.
You used to be able to just pop it out and swap. Those were the days
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”.
Oh, so like ambulances in the USA.
“The ambulance had issues making it unsafe (or even illegal) to drive? But it can still drive down the road? Doesn’t seem too bad: keep an eye on it.”
You’d think they’d have money to keep it pristine, with how much a short ambulance ride costs in the USA
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.
Why were they fired?
The bowties
Well yeah, I got that. But did they interpret that as mockery or did I miss something?
I have no idea why they were fired or who fired them - I just know that they were fired.
Bombast had a lot of helplessly incompetent (and sometimes clinically insane) executives running things, but they never lasted that long. There seemed to be some sort of Avenging Angel of Death wandering the Bombast Center and culling the more useless examples of management. My bowtie-wearing boss was one of these and certainly deserved the axe, but I don’t know if this was true of the other members of the bowtie brigade.
The shared internet thing is a setting that comes turned on for Xfinity routers by default (aka the ones you rent from them). If you go into the settings of the router you can turn the wifi sharing setting off.
Once I realized this I turned it off on my modem/router. I turned the router function off completely to be able to use my own equipment rather than the crap they give you.
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.
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
There is a million times more counterfeit/fake items at amazon than you think, and they dont care one bit to fix the problem
I recall watching a video about the nature of how things are stored at Amazon warehouses - basically if there are multiple sellers offering the same item it all goes in the same bin. Even if you are providing a genuine product, there’s a very good chance one of the other sellers is not, and that counterfeit gets sent out attached to your seller ID. Then you get a complaint for selling a counterfeit item someone else provided.
Then when that seller is caught and booted, they just register another trademark with 5-10 random characters and do it again. This is causing a massive headache for the US Trademark Office as well.
I bought a pepper grinder called the Pepper Cannon. Yes, its wonderfully overengineered and costs a fortune. But it’s made in the USA, and they’ve been pretty open with their startup process for making it.
Few months ago I was browsing across amazon and lo and behold, some pepper grinders that look identical to the pepper cannon came up. They were all cheaper knockoffs, selling for a fraction of the cost, and outright stealing PCs industrial design. I didn’t buy one, as I don’t need one and didn’t really care enough to test if the mechanism was the same as the one I bought, but I did drop a line to the pepper cannon guys so they can try to get em delisted
Now I want a Pepper Cannon. Would you recommend getting it, before I ruin my hype by looking up the price or what is actually is? :D
Its really great if you like pepper. It puts out an absolute ton of it, and you’ll find yourself going through way more black pepper than you thought you ever could. And the grind settings are unrivaled; you can get tiny little faerie dusts of pepper, all the way up to big honkin flakes that work great on a steak. Whenever I’m doing a brisket or similar on the smoker, its great to have on hand
Its milled out of a single billet of aluminum, the grinding mechanism js custom built, and the whole thing just screams quality.
And you pay for it. They’re around $200
There’s also a salt cannon, if you want the same sort of thing but built for salt. I got it because I like the matching pair, but you don’t strictly need it; salt is salt, regardless of where it was ground.
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.
Programming teams I’ve worked with are a joke.
Company A: We got hacked and the lead dev argued for days it wasn’t a hack. Malware was actively being served to customers during this time period because she refused to deal with it and there was no security team.
Company B: programming team was the IT guys nephew and some random UI designer who hadn’t finished college and was never able to be employed after finishing college…
Company C: We interviewed a candidate who was way over qualified and would make our life so easy because he was eager and hungry. Instead we hired a bootcamper who had never heard of docker (half our infra is docker), react, or anything other than vanilla JavaScript. She failed our practical but still got hired because the hiring manager wanted and assistant. She has become a glorified project manager, but still has the title software engineer.
In my company we have a very modern agile workflow where QA is top priority.
At least that what we advertise. In reality it’s all an unorganized clusterfuck where I’m pretty sure I am the only one who bothers to write automated tests. Who’s got time to write tests bro just push that shit out ASAP we’ll deal with it when the client calls us in the middle of the night to complain about previously-working shit being broken now.
When you have a great programmer working on your project he will be cycled to a new project in 2-3 months. Your new senior developer who silently takes over the project is part time because he’s working on finishing his education.
No one knows how anything works, except that one guy, who left the company half a year ago. That’s how all software development is.
A lot of outsourcers do this. Here’s my experience with a few companies.
- The “team” you meet are competent, English speaking fronts. They are the demo models of the people who will work on your projects.
- After the contract is signed, these people are swapped out with randos of varying competence.
- In some cases, some of these randos are further hidden behind aliases: people with names that are actually more than one person sharing logins and passwords.
- They will string you along, trying to charge maximum hours worked without regards to product or services delivered.
- Most of these companies have a “bucket of crabs” mentality: the managers are horrible, the staff incompetent, and once the gain some skill, they leave for better companies. They backstab one another, hijack projects to fuck over coworkers, and lie and cover their tracks. Some of this is cultural, like a caste system, while some are just racist.
At one time, these people were pretty good, but they realized they had skills and left for other countries for better pay and better working conditions. The bids got more and more competitive, cutting costs until they were literally filled with low-skilled labor who can’t be promoted or leave for economic or competence reasons.
Now that I read this, I’m kinda glad that our company doesn’t do anything like that. But it’s just a small indie team porting games to consoles, so I guess what you’re mentioning is the bigger corp problem.
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.
This one doesn’t surprise me. I remember a recording of a guy in India doing a job interview over the phone. He had a friend on a other phone giving him the answers to the test questions. The person giving the interview heard enough in the background to figure this out, and gave the cheater tips on how to be less obvious next time.
Just remembered another one:
Have you ever had an anonymous survey sent to you by your work or by a company your work has hired? They’re not anonymous. Management knows what your opinions are and will use them against you.
I worked for a consultant that would try and help fix businesses. The worst example I can think of was when I saw one person had answered a survey question saying that their employer had a “blame culture”. Rather than trying to work on the processes or address why something had gone wrong, staff would start pointing fingers to keep out of trouble. This didn’t fix anything and only made people spend all the time covering their posteriors.
The manager called a general meeting of everyone at that site and then singled out the employee who’d mentioned the blame culture, blaming him for saying there was a blame culture. The employee then pointed out that they’d been told, in writing, that the survey was anonymous. That employee called the manager a liar and then she lost control of the meeting, with lots of employees calling her a liar and several storming out. They weren’t in business the next year.
The building, used by several hundred employees, had a security systems with 4-digit codes. I’ve been part of group of people who liked to work late times, and the building would lock at midnight – the box by the door would start beeping and you would need to unlock it within a minute or so, or “proper alarm” would ensue.
However, to unlock the alarm you did not need your card – all you needed to do was to enter any valid code. Guess what was the chance that, say,
1234was someone’s valid code? Yes.We’ve been all using some poor guy’s code
1234, and after several years, when he left the company we just guessed some other obvious code (4321) and kept using that.By the way, after entering the code to the box by the door, it would shortly display name of the person whom the code “belonged” to. One of our colleagues took it as a personal secret project to slowly go through all 10000 possible codes and collect the names of the people, just for the kick of it.
(By the way, I don’t work for that company anymore, and more importantly, the company does not use that building anymore, so don’t get any ideas! 🙃 )
