Ask Lemmy

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.

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 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.

At Disneyland, Mickey Mouse is always played by a woman, due to the small costume. So if you put your arm around him for a photo, try not to accidentally touch Mickey’s boobs.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The majority of tech startups are super chaotic and barely keeping things running. More than you would ever imagine.

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.

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.

That I made their DropBox account, and they can't access it anymore..

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.

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".

Shit, piss or vomit has graced just about every surface at your public pool and the staff are constantly fighting a losing battle against it. Nothing is washed just power sprayed till it looks clean.

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.

A large pizza chain, it costs about $1 to make a large cheese pizza. Cheese is re-used as much as possible.