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 worked in government contracting (and government, for that matter) for years and that blows my mind. I can’t remember the details, but if you even had a bad reviews, much less being found noncompliant, it could disqualify you entirely from some contract vehicles for a matter of years. Wild that there’s some agency that somehow lets people get away with fraud.
Also, if that cost the government money, there’s a chance you could report that after the fact and make some money.
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?
The contractor I worked for was run by a man who used to say “if the contract says they’ll blow up the contractor on delivery, we’re putting in a bid and solve the problem later”
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.
We need a whole branch of government dedicated to fucking with insurance companies. They basically generate free money by having money, they don’t actually provide any net positive outside of just having money
We need to move to single payer healthcare and just eliminate the need for insurance companies.
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.
As weird as it may seem, this might be a good argument in favor of Pascal. I despised learning it at uni, as it seems worthless, but is seems that it can still handle business-critical software for 20 years.
downtime
minimal retraining
I feel your pain. Many good ideas that cause this are rejected. I have had ideas requiring one big downtime chunk rejected even though it reduces short but constant downtimes and mathematically the fix will pay for itself in a month easily.
Then the minimal retraining is frustrating when work environments and coworkers still pretend computers are some crazy device they’ve never seen before.
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.
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 worked as software engineer and my boss tolerated me going to office at 2pm and leave at 9pm. It’s against company policy, certainly, but no one talked about it. It still is my most productive and happy time.
This comment is not like the others, lol.
Good on your manager.
I’m changing jobs at the moment. I accepted a position at a UK office of an American company which I was a perfect fit for but they wouldn’t tolerate remote working or flexitime. A few days after, I was offered a job at a UK company offering 80% remote work and very generous flexi but for £5000/year less. I let the American company know I wouldn’t be starting with them after all. Honestly, it this day and age flexible hours and such aren’t a big ask for most information workers and work-life life balance is too important.
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 always thought there’s exactly 0 counterfeit/fake items at amazon, so … 0 times million … phew…
/s
I wrote a review about a counterfeit item I received. They never approved that one. I haven’t bought cologne from them since.
I bought a bicycle light set (front and rear) a few years ago. They work fine (in fact, I still use the headlight; the rear still works, but it was replaced by a radar light), and I wrote a review. More recently, I was looking back through my purchases, and I came across the review I’d written, but the lights they were now selling on that page were a completely different design than the ones I had.
I edited my review to note that the current lights didn’t match the ones I had, not that it’ll do any good with a million other reviews of those lights. I know Amazon doesn’t really care, but I very often see “There is a newer version of this item available here” links, so I’m surprised that this was possible.
I’ve gone through reviews where it’s not even the same product. 🤬
This is not a secret
they dont care one bit to fix the problem
Who is they? Warehouse workers? Because without getting into too many details, I know someone fairly high up at Amazon corporate, and if I recall correctly her colleague runs a whole…divison? I don’t know, largish multi-person unit…and their whole job is addressing the counterfeit problem. I think it’s just really hard to do.
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.
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
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 ;)
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.
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.
Can confirm. I am the smelly guy. Leave me alone and you get code. Bother me and you don’t.
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 would recommend Keepass
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.
Name the network? As a Christian I find this disgusting
Jimmy Swaggart Ministries
Sounds like you escaped a violent theocratic cult.
No, cults are small religions, this is a big religion
I feel like there are minimum two definitions of cult, that being a high controll group like say jones town and to a lesser but still damaging extent seventh day adventists for example and just a smaller religious grouping.
This place would 100% meet the BITE standard of cult classification.
The BITE classification was invented in order to justify hatred of small religions, by taking a word that already had a meaning (cult) and attaching a second, pejorative meaning to it. It’s like if I write a fantasy novel with a species of evil creatures called jews. Jew is already a word, and it’s a horrific act of religious persecution to take a pre-existing word for marginalised religions and spin it into an unrelated negative.
Yes, because controlling a group’s behavior, information access, thoughts, and emotions is completely acceptable. Autonomy be damned.
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.
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.
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.
Why not name them?
name them
It was McDonalds. They had collection boxes for Mcdonalds Children’s charity.
Yikes. I thought that was just a tax writeoff
