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
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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).
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.
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.
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 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".
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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! 🙃 )
Why is everyone here afraid to name the companies?
Unless you're sharing something that only you would know and the company is aware that you're the only one who knows it, there's no way they can identify you.
Something tells me the people posting here who had "NDAs" didn't actually have any sort of a high level clearance to important information.
Not strictly a company secret, but I had to sign an NDA for it, because... reasons.
I used to work for a massive conglomerate, these guys are making from components for satellites and tank to rubber gloves for hospitals, and everything in between. My job was to help the company implement regulations, work with auditors and generally follow product specific rules.
So I was on these 2 New Product Development teams and because the products needed some very specific testing equipment, we started working with local authorities and some contractors to build the testing station in the future factory. We drafted plans, prepare documents, we had an auditor come and see the place, the contractor came and checked what he needed to do, everything was going according to plan.
While all of this was happening, I was on a separate project where we were working on closing down the above mentioned factory.
S&P and Moody's were collaborating since at least 2000 on the pricing of the so-called "esoteric" structured instruments associated with mortgaged-backed securities that caused the 4Q07 crash. They collaborated via the competitive intelligence firm Washington Information Group (which does not seem to be around anymore.) The collaboration was almost certainly illegal (IANAL). They did this because neither wanted a price war when rating these. I did sign an NDA with S&P that kept me out of the industry for two years. I left the industry shortly after that and went back to what I used to do.
An European Country stores citizens' critical data in vulnerable databases, whose password is in HaveIBeenPwned, on a VPN whose certificates are stored in random NASs. The IT guys don't know how encryption and certificates work and I wouldn't be surprised if everything was in some adversary countries' hands
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 used to work at Starbucks (almost a decade ago now), but at the time, the motto was "just say yes" to any customer requests. We also had free drink cards that you could give out to deesclate any issue. So I would say any time you're even the slightest bit unhappy, bring it up, and you should at least have your problem solved, if not compensated for a free drink next time.
We also had customer satisfaction surveys that would print on reciepts, where filling one out would get the customer a free drink. We always kept them for customers that were happier to try and rig the odds in our favour of a higher rating, but also if a customer asked for one, I would give it if I had it. You could always ask the cashier if they have any of those as well.
Again, not sure how much either of those things have changed in the past 10 years, and I'm not sure how regional it was (this was in Canada at a corporately run store), but maybe worth a try.
Also I love these types of threads -- great topic to post.
Worked in tech support for a major internet provider. We would constantly have major ouages in various locations due to overtaxed systems going down. Corporate refused to allow us to admit that there were problems on our end and forced the techs to troubleshoot the customer calls, even though we all knew that we could do nothing for the customer. Saw multiple techs releived of their job for telling the truth to the customers. So many hours wasted on both the customer and techs part.
DoorDash and food apps are willingly scamming restaurants, and users.
They are perpetually in debt as they aren't actually making money and they will likely only make very little.
Ubers only profitable line of business was UberFrieght, then they decided to outsource it or shutter it.
Both of these companies broke laws early on in order to operate.
Most of you support that came from Uber in before 2019 were coming from drunk 20 something's.
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.
The biotech making your new drugs follows a less than scientific method. Lots of cherry picking of data, fudging results, etc. Part of me thinks this is part of why a lot of drugs never make it past trials. There is more incentive for individuals to come up with a drug that almost passes trials than to come up empty handed for years.
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.
I don't have any interesting secrets or facts from my current ex-jobs, so I'll share an interesting fact from a buddy's. It's one of those companies that offers automated phone systems (and chats, nowadays) that listen to your options rather than taking number inputs.
This may no longer be the case, but these systems were not actually automated. There are entire call centers dedicated to these phone systems, whereby an operator listens to your call snippet and manually selects the next option in the phone tree, or transcribes your input.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if advances in AI have made this whole song and dance less in need of human intervention, but once upon a time, your call wasn't truly automated - it was federated.
There have been plenty of movies and shows based on this so I guess I'm more confirming a poorly kept secret than I am revealing it, but;
If you go out to eat in a college town (esp if it's a state school,) there's a good chance that almost every employee (managers, bartenders, servers, you name it) is drinking or smoking pot out back, if not in the middle of an active bender. We'd fill our water bottles with alcohol, make food for our stoner friends in exchange for drugs, take shots in the walk-in fridge, roll on Molly while cooking, run out back to puke, and rally for the rest of our shift. After closing we'd meet up with other industry friends, usually at a bar where one of them was still working, close that place down, then pair off and hook up in questionable places.
I've had sex on restaurant rooftops and patios, in supply closets, behind the stacked pallets in dry storage, and in the manager's office. I witnessed others get it on in booths, on top of the video poker machines, and even on the bar itself. Thankfully never where food was prepared, but that was pretty much the only thing that was off limits, and only within my social circle. I can't speak about others.
I'm a boring elder millennial now, but every once in a while I reminisce about working in the service industry. I don't think I appreciated how much freedom I had, I was too busy worrying about money, school, and relationships. I definitely wouldn't do it again, but I'm glad I got to sow my oats, or whatever.
Code base is shit. We’re not doing what we’re promising or any close of it. We’re probably going to bankrupt in a year or two.
We used to sell Windows built-in Recovery tool.
I find it humorous that y’all think it’s only the company you worked at that had a fragile tech solution held together (sometimes literally) with duct tape and coat hangers, as part of a mission critical business process.
Pretty much every company big or tiny has at least one permanent “temporary” solution in place.
About 25 years ago I worked in a small town KFC franchise. Owner was, well, what you'd expect in a small town franchise owner - there was lots of pressure to cut costs and the manager had their job threatened at least once a month due to cost overruns (which cut into the owner's profits).
Manager quote, "I don't care if it's green, cook it anyway, nobody will tell once it's breaded and fried."
i dont think it was a secret for anything
but i once went to a job interview at a phone support line for an ISP in my country
it turned out to be ... a sales department. basically that's what they called it. all support calls had to eventually lead into selling something.
that just seems so idiotic i couldn't deal with it
I did some IT work at a hospital, patient records including names, addresses, conditions and doctor's notes (inc mental health notes) were stored in the database in plain text. You had to have admin access to the database (which I did), but I was stunned that I could browse anyone's entire medical information. A few weeks after I left I sent an anonymous email to a couple of people letting them know how bad it was - I didn't use my real one just in case they may have come after me for looking at the records.
My wife worked at a pretty well-known hiking supplies store in our country. The retail price is sometimes over x4 the manufacturing cost and extremely marked up. The amount of faulty products with manufacturing faults is really high, with the suppliers 100% aware but gave the stores discounts on the wholesale price just to push units, even though the clothes/bags/shoes would break after a year or so of light use.
I work for a MSP that works a lot with very large tech companies. Most of these companies outsource a lot of work to India. I frequently have to remote in and help them with our product. You'll see passwords in plain text being thrown around in teams chats, .txt documents on the desktop and emails like candy. I will frequently work with individuals with titles like "Cloud Engineer" to "Solutions Expert" that I swear have never opened a terminal window in their life and unable to follow basic IT instructions. I have worked with a lot of very good Indian engineers, but I swear chronyism has a lot of people put into positions that they aren't really qualified for.
I worked for a pretty popular magazine back in the late 90's. One day near the beginning/middle of 2000, we were all called down to the bullpen for a last minute meeting by management and marketing. (That's never a good sign.)
We were told that we have a great product with amazing writing, but marketing doesn't know how to sell it so they're closing us down. Instead, we went online only. I was the web developer so I survived the firings.
So then we figured that we were set because our website produced more content and had more traffic than any of the company's other websites. However, in March of 2001, we had another emergency meeting. Again, we were told our content was great, but the company was going in another direction. Instead of producing our own content, the company was going to just repost other sites' content. I and everyone else in my team were let go.
Needless to say, the whole "we'll just repost what other people posted" plan didn't go so well. Last time I checked, the company wasn't doing very well at all.
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.
Snake Farm, when asked how to sell a policy that's clearly more expensive than the competition's answer was "They should feel privilege to be a Snake Farm customer."
The hubris was baffling.
Worked for a Gaming Hoster. Critical informations where hidden in small texts everywhere just (we) couldn't get sued. VPS would get "corrupted" when not used for a period of time, just so we could replace it with a new server. Backends were not protected. You could replace the executable with something malicious and get access to the server. Some more specific things i can't name or it would be clear which hoster it is. NEVER trust a gaming hoster which have access to you server files..
The last company I worked for has both NDA's and arbitration agreements, which would keep me from spilling company secrets and would screw me over if I did. But here is a secret - they use online PDF forms and <whispers> don't check what text is entered into the signature.
My previous employer - a multi-billion dollar internet search company would secretly listen to people's conversation via their mobile devices then place ads on the same devices (e.g in the browser search results or at the start of videos) based on keywords from the conversations, this had to be kept hidden of course and this large well-known company shall remain nameless.
I worked for an MSP doing IT for an assortment of companies. Most of the companies were in the medical or legal fields. Every single computer they sold to their clients, used the exact same bitlocker key when booting the computer. If you've worked for one of the companies we supported, you knew the bitlocker key for all of them. Iat been the exact same bitlocker key for at least 10 years. This MSP also regularly puts out social media posts and emails saying how security focused they are etc, etc.
If you're doing a holiday in the USA and renting a car via enterprise, Alamo or national book with Rentalcars.com, unless you're flying with doing a Virgin package holiday, in Which case do it with them. They have the best rates in the market due to special agreements. If you want the best customer service experience for rental cars book with Virgin as they will put a lot of pressure on Alamo/national/enterprise who will bend over backwards for you.
I work for a commercial airliner (regional) on the ramp and cleaning planes (regional and mainline - 737, 738 etc).
Don't drink the coffee. The coffee pots rarely get switched out and are only cleaned with water from a water bottle, after an agent used the same gloves to clean other parts of the plane (assuming they don't start with the galley or taking out the trash).
i worked in a place where we put journal,magasin in leters and film. we got a DISGUSTING porn thing like... i dont even think it was legal (zoo ect) i personaly refuse to put that in envelope. and you know what? the most common adress we got? religious person. yup most recieve it was the one in church reading you the bibles...
It was me, I did it, I put that cheeky note on the noticeboard. I told the boss I accepted responsibility because I was in charge on that shift, but in fact it was me all along. Sorry Derek. (Not sorry.)
I worked for a very large insurance company until recently . IT is run like the Wild West. Contractors seem to do whatever they want.  after a merger several years ago, all the people who built the systems were driven out, leaving a bunch of low paid outsourced contractors to support everything. The entire IT infrastructure is a bad day from collapsing.
One company I worked at had more full-time collections people than sales people. Our products were a lot cheaper than our competitors, and it attracted a lot of customers with no money.
Another company I worked at ignored all "first notice" bills they ran up. CFO told me that if a company wanted paid, they needed to send a second notice.
The potato and gravy at KFC uses whatever crud fell to the bottom of the friers each day. Usually that was good chicken bits, but sometimes it could be whatever the staff were playing catch with for fun.
Oh and be nice to the people making your food. Trust me on that one.
Worked Customer Service for a well-known car company that also had it's own financial services dept with its own branded credit card. During training we were told that the card itself sucked and that smart/discerning customers would likely reject getting the card if they actually knew the details. Why should people get the card? Just based on the "prestige" of the brand, because they would see it as a status symbol. And they had a quota for us to sign people up for every month, which I consistently failed because literally the only time I could get anybody to sign up for the card was when they didn't care enough to know the details and just absent-mindedly said, "Yea sure, I'll do that."
The dealership I worked for gave out loans they knew people couldn’t afford, ignored safety items, slapped inspection stickers that didn’t match vehicles to get them on the lot. Ran a lift that was jerry rigged because the wiring busted along with the hydraulic tank.
Employee bought a vehicle and his manager watched where he went on his lunch (via GPS installed by said company into sold vehicles). Funnily enough it was to an interview.
Oh another one. School bus company 1 is one of the largest in the US. In between runs a buddies transmission starts leaking on his bus. He calls the terminal on my phone to let them know.
“Keep driving keep it going, we are not sending out another bus to you.”
Transmission in a 45ft flat nose busts fully in the middle of one of the busiest intersections in the town. He calls over radio letting them know it busted as he told them.
“What do you mean this is first time I’m hearing about this”
Flat nose I drove kept writing up for not having heat and turning it into the people I was told. This went for an entire winter and I didn’t have heat until after the thaw and spring started. Mechanic never knew that bus had been being written up. They were hiding slips. Same bus, folding door let go and was flapping in the wind with a bus full of students. Over the radio they said to keep driving and refused to send a replacement.
There is an unreleased and un-leaked version of the 2012 ARGOS Christmas advert, not dissimilar to the infamous "rainbow for adults" sketch which leaked many years ago.
To watch it we had all our phones taken away from us, and there was a pretty thorough "OK you all saw it, funny hey, time to destroy the CD"
I worked for a company that had an expensive San Jose lease during the .com bubble. When they decided they needed to get out of that lease, they folded the company - “fired” everyone, then re-hired everyone under an independent second company that was owned by the parent company. Sketchy, but not really surprising…
When they re-hired me, they didn’t have me sign any NDAs. All the old NDAs were with the company that folded, not the parent company. Some days I wish I had been unethical enough to sell off their source code to a competitor.
At Google lax, the exec assistant of Dustin Jackson has herpes and has given it to a mess of people. Well done Nicole!
A lot of property and casualty insurance carriers, think the ones that do your homeowners in auto insurance, are absolutely aware of the devastating effects of climate change and climate catastrophe, but they won't go out of their way to say it out loud.
You can tell this is true by when they start restricting policies in certain states or areas.
Nothing ever actually gets sanitized and we lots of "new products" are actually repackaged returns from other stores.
Ignoring all common sense approaches to staying competitive by using simple, textbook ideas of strategic management does negatively impact growth.
Imagine that!
We would "file it". As in file it under "fuck it it's fine".
Battersea Dogs Homes senior dog carers are employed based on their PR experience and not at all on their experience at looking after dogs
I worked for a government contractor that would have me log into to classified data to monitor uptime.
I was not cleared to view it nor did I have my own account so my manager had me log in with his credentials.
In the US where I'm located, that's a felony for the individuals and a massive fine for the company.
I first wrote the most fucked up shit i know but since my life can be ruined with a single comment. (The joys of living in an autoritarian country with corruption and nepotism running deep in the government ) Instead i'll just say to avoid exported food coming from third world countries. Especially if you know corruption runs deep there. If the product target expats and is a processed [ingredients that made me remember my country ] you're literally eating shit...
I worked for a certain media company that sold hardware / software in cars with memberships (typically through a deal with the OEMs). For those customers that have the hardware-only experience, a set of testing IDs can be applied that effectively give free membership and can't really be revoked because of their wide-use in initial manufacturing provisioning. There have been multiple independent security reviews pointing this out, but not much can be done about it because of how the trial memberships are applied after manufacturing.
Nice try fbi
parting gifts weren't actually gifts. nice ladder I'm still using after ~20 years
Alesis, creators of ADAT Type 2 digital audio tapes hired none other that James Doohan to promote it playing the “Famous Engineer” because they didn’t get the rights to anything Star Trek.
It was only played during trade shows, but someone I know got a copy.
Yes, in the mid 1990s, large banks in the USA were being electronically compromised so often that they wouldn’t investigate or pursue a loss if it was under $50k.
We didn't investigate an online theft from any bank account unless it was over US $100k.
Even without any details, I seriously got scared i'd be put in jail. My country isn't know for it's freedom.
Edit :meant to answer a comment but somehow screwed that up.
Mike from Tom's Landscaping smokes a bowl of reefer in his car at lunch break every day.
Sorry Mike someone had to say something.
I know this thread is old but: so many HIPPA violations, oh my God. I am a pediatric therapists/child psych, and the clinic I used to work at constantly stored client data in the most insecure ways, and therapists and staff would discuss client names, diagnosis', address, EVERYTHING openly in the break room. I complained at one point, but it went nowhere. Turns out nobody cares, lol. They also frequently ignored the best interests of our clients to maximize profit from insurance (leaning towards fraud). I ultimately left the company when my boss blatantly violated the safety of one of my clients by refusing to send her home when she had a fever of 104 F. Sure, working with kids means everyone gets sick a lot, but when the child is THAT sick, they need to be in a hospital, not in a hot, cramped room with a therapist.
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Every time we notified anyone about a potential illegal breach of gdpr that could get us fined or sued, admin pretended they had never been informed because the changes would take too long and collide with their plans to "revamp everything, reinvent the platform, and rebrand".
I should have whistleblown them myself if it were not for the fact that doing so would probably get some previous employees fired rather than hurt the company.
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