2y ago

What's a company secret you can share now that you no longer work there?

972 comments

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.
- cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests
  I’m not an infrastructure person. If the receiving web server doesn’t log the URI, and supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS, which removes the credentials from the URI, are there security concerns?
  
  Anyone who has access to any involved network infrastructure can trace the cleartext communication and extract the credentials.
  
  I'm not 100% on this but I think GET requests are logged by default.
  POST requests, normally used for passwords, don't get logged by default.
  BUT the Uri would get logged would get logged on both, so if the URI contained @username:Password then it's likely all there in the logs
  
  Nope, it's bare-ass HTTP. The server software also connected to an LDAP server.
  
  I would still not sleep well; other things might log URI's to different unprotected places. Depending on how the software works, this might be client, but also middleware or proxy...
  
  supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS
  I can practically guarantee you it was not
  
  Browser history
  Even if the destination doesn't log GET components, there could be corporate proxies that MITM that might log the URL. Corporate proxies usually present an internally trusted certificate to the client.
- 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.
  
  Places like that never learn their lesson until The Event™ happens. At my last place, The Event™ was a derecho that knocked out power for a few days, and then when it came back on, the SAN was all kinds of fucked. On top of that, we didn't have backups for everything because they didn't want to pay for more storage. They were losing like $100K+ every hour they were down.
  The speed at which they approved all-new hardware inside a colocation facility after The Event™ was absolutely hilarious, I'd never seen anything approved that quickly.
  Trust me, they're going to keep putting it off until you have your own version of The Event™, and they'll deny that they ever disregarded the risk of it happening in the first place, even though you have years' worth of emails saying "If we don't do X, Y will occur." And when when Y occurs, they'll scream "Oh my God, Y has occurred, no one could have ever foreseen this!"
  It'll happen. Wait and watch.
- 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.
  
  What OP didn't tell you is that, due to its age, it's running on an unpatched WinXP SP2 install and patching, upgrading to SP3, or to any newer Windows OS will break the software calls that version of Pascal relies upon.
  
  Survivorship Bias
  
  Anything can if you don't update it.

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
- Not to put the blame on the devs, but the problems might have been attenuated by defining a proper interface layer against the server.
  
  It's a damn single player game 💀
- That’s cool to know! I had been wondering what happened with that historically bad launch.
  
  Kevin Fang - The Worst Website Launch of All Time
  <on Youtube>
  <on Piped's frontend (thanks bot!)>
- I knew that's gonna be gold after I read that first sentence

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.
  
  We're house shopping and there has been a house on a lake sitting on the market forever. I got curious and researched the lake and... It's a literal superfund site. The company that was on the other side of the lake just dumped their waste chemicals right on the shore and it has polluted both the lake and ground water forever essentially because they don't break down. I looked up the previous owner... Died of cancer. The shit that companies are and were allowed to get away with is just insane. Meanwhile right wing nut jobs want to get rid of the EPA (which was ironically created by Richard Nixon).
  
  Some places are insanely polluted to the point where you wonder how a whole company could be so braindead and essentially poison themselves.
  "That's the future guy's problem, my problem is making money."
  No need to wonder. That's how.
  
  A place not far from where I live had a chemical plant which just dumped loads of chemicals on a meadow for years.
  Sounds cheap.
  
  The largest lake in the UK by area got massively polluted and turned into a swamp of toxic green algae. It's crazy how people just let stuff like that happen.
- 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.
  
  @Taralcaran @thrawn21 fucking yikes. Was the public notified in any way? Did it make it to the news? Or just kind of brushed under the rug?
- What are they poisoned with and how does it happen?
  
  Varies depending on the site, sometimes it's gasoline, or solvents, or heavy metals or PFAS. As for how it happens, accidental or deliberate releases. I've found military documents from the 50s that say the official place to dispose of used motor oil was a pit they'd dug in the ground.
  
  Here's a recent article about PFAS in drinking water. Very unfortunate.
  
  Heavy metals and PCBs are most common in my area, various VOCs aren't far behind. Prior to the EPA and associated legislation companies would commonly use waste process waters for dust control, dump wastes in to pits or on the ground, spills would be left to soak away, and general processes were dirtier and uncontrolled.
  One terrible example from western NY that bugs me even more than Love Canal is the involvement with the Manhattan Project. Local steel workers rolled Uranium and they were never told what is was, given any protections, or cared for when the inevitable happened. Radioactive waste was later used as fill for residential and commercial properties in the area. These Hotspot still exist and it is a slow process to get any cleanup done.
- I work in air quality and it's a similar story. It's crazy to me seeing how much is unregulated, grandfathered in, or simply not enforced.
- What do you want? They moved it out of the environment. . .

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 think we work in the same company, the dude does not smell funny to me but maybe that's just me.
  
  Are you that dude?
  
  We all work for that company. Except at mine, I work remote, so I have only myself to blame the stinkiness on.
- 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.
  
  Throw in a mysterious comment that says "Don't change anything below this line or everything breaks" and it's complete.
  "We don't know why this works, but it does, don't touch it." would also be acceptable.
  
  Thai is basically my current team, haha.
- 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.
  
  I've worked for one company that actually did it right (complete with pair programming, even). It was pretty nice.
  Too bad we were apparently the "experimental?" team and the only one in the whole company doing it that way.
- 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.
- 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.
- Can confirm. I am the smelly guy. Leave me alone and you get code. Bother me and you don't.
- Hah, is this contracting? And what is done vs agile?
  
  Think waterfall. But like. No design and no testing.
  Not contracting, just another small shop that offers “complete” solutions from a to z kinda situation.
  The only competent person in that org would be, oddly enough, the ceo. Everybody else just feel like they show up to be marked present on an attendance sheet in terms of being useful.

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

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?
  
  You responded to the wrong comment, but i’ve been seeing that a lot so I wonder what causes it.
- 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"
- Promising features that never existed is part and parcel to a lot of software sales, whether gov or private. Speaking from post-sales experience.
  
  I think it’s fine to promise them, but to claim they currently exist when you never plan to implement them is what I couldn’t support.
- 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.
  
  Might be local government. Me and sales have this argument pretty often
  Me: it is in the spec
  Sales: no one noticed it except you
  Me: thanks?
  Sales: no one is going to care
  Me: then take it out of the spec and resign everything.
  Sales: why are you making a big deal about this?
  Me: because it is in the spec that we signed and if we don't honor the spec they can backcharge us.
  Sales: that won't happen
  Me: you are right because we are going to follow the spec. If you don't want me to please email me, the department head, and the client specifically ordering me not to follow the contract that we signed.

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.
  
  Having worked for Amazon across multiple facilities. This is not true or at least wasn’t. When stowing everything seemed pretty random for spots. Seemed to be where ever there was space. But the items themselves when not sold directly by Amazon use a different set of numbers than the B00 number I think it is an FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) number.
  That being said, just going to the bathroom was enough to tank the rate for day and have to play catch-up. Lunches reset this.
  In one facility they caught two people in a Gaylord having some relations. Same facility they found a used sex toy that had biological material.
- 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
- I think there's a lot, yet I also don't doubt you.
  'Course, at this point so much of the stuff is the same randomly-generated-brand-name Chinese shit as EBay and Aliexpress have anyway that it doesn't really matter anymore most of the time.
- This is not a secret
- I always thought there's exactly 0 counterfeit/fake items at amazon, so ... 0 times million ... phew...
  /s
- It's what happens when it turns into a marketplace where 3rd party vendors can sell to.
- 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.
- Exactly why I only buy from Amazon when I can't find it after searching elsewhere for a while.
- 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.
  
  Amazon has a policy of binning items with the same UPC together, regardless of the source. What this means is if you buy a valid product and any vendor who is part of their warehouse storage system sells counterfeits, then there is a chance of you getting a counterfeit part, regardless of who you buy from. This reduces the number of locations required for a given item. It just requires that you trust your vendors to not counterfeit. If they were kept separate you could easily see who is selling counterfeits, but it would require more space.
  So Amazon has traded the ability to sell parts from verifiable vendors for short-term profits. At this point in the game, your best assumption is if there is any knock-off company selling the product you wish to buy you have no way of knowing it it's legitimate or counterfeit. This is currently diluting their brand and will ultimately impact their sales, if not their profits.
  
  Well the easiest solution is to go back to having Amazon be the seller of products on Amazon, but we all one that ship sailed.
  But if the problem is shared bin storage, the solution isn't free, but it's also not as expensive as lots of buyer confidence:
  Tag every item with a QR code indicating its source when it comes into the distribution center. Use that code to identify the bad actors when there are returns and ban them.
  "But what about products not shipped by Amazon?"
  In that case, you know who sold and shipped the product, and if they can't get their shit together they shouldn't be allowed to work with Amazon.
  
  It's not hard to do it, its hard to do it and make the same amount of money...
- One of the major issues is counterfeit baby products, specifically sleep products. In the US, sleep spaces for babies are highly regulated. The terms “bassinet, crib, and playard” are terms that can only be used for products that pass rigorous ASTM testing. If something doesn’t complete that testing then they are not allowed to use one of those terms in ads or on their manual. This is why you’ll see many products listed as “loungers” because they’re not safe for sleep. There are hundreds of products online that are horribly made and steal manuals of actual approved products. Amazon is notified (groups I’m in notify them) and they don’t care. There are also products that aren’t knock-off versions of things but just flat out lie and say a product is safe for sleep when it isn’t and will use one of the protected terms - which makes the sale of them illegal.
- Random advice: if the market for your product is already lousy with scams without amazon, dont by it on amazon!

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.
- Ruby Falls?
  
  Ye!
  
  After looking it up, you can find reports from others stating the same things. When I was there as a kid, I remember that they claimed no one knew where the source of the water came from... I guess they actually know enough to help it out at least, lol
  I really enjoyed it and would like to go again, but it's no Mammoth Cave.
- Gravity Falls?
  
  Boop!
- Nawh mate, Rock City is different from Ruby Falls. They also hate the guts out of Ruby Falls lol
- Niagara falls?
  
  Nawh mate, that's up in New York and Canada.
  
  Victoria falls?
- For some reason I’m not surprised to learn this about Ruby Falls. Lived near it awhile and visited.
  Eh kinda cruddy to learn, but also was still a cool experience.

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).

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.

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
- 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.
  
  Did you check to see if you still got a strong Infinity signal in your house? I'm not sure this was something you could turn off.
- If you disconnect your existing connection, and got a new one using another name, saying that you're new occupant, you can get that new connection discount (over and over again).
  
  I've never had to disconnect. Once the discount has expired, I just go online and check the prices for changing my internet speed. Most of the time there's a discounted one (with a contract agreement of course). But I've been switching back and forth between different speeds for years and saved a lot of money that way. Also buy your own modem/router instead of paying rental fees for their equipment.
  
  Careful, sometimes they'll come out just to pull your plug from a concentrator when you disconnect, or it just happens when they're hooking up a new customer and yours gets unplugged to make room. But then they turn around and charge like $50 just to come out and plug that back in for a new install. That can be the entire install, you can bring your own modem and have everything fine inside, but some yahoo charges $50 to come out and plug some coax into a concentrator in a box 20 ft from your house that they unplugged for free last week.
  
  With Time Warner you don't even have to do that you can just call up and ask, they'll probably give you the discount. They absolutely do not care.
- Oh Spectrum does this too. How else would you have it in an apartment complex down a dead end road with nothing else around? This, among other reasons, is why I bought my own modem and router.
- I don't understand the bow tie thing, that just seems petty. Why would they fire them?
  
  Not the OP, but my speculation? The new folks in charge didn't like the founder and the people who looked up to him and wanted to take the company in a completely different direction.
  They likely already knew who the loyalists were before the funeral, but if not, those who self identified by wearing bowties would work just as well.
- Just say comcast...
  Next we're going to go back to using SWIM, lol.
- This is why I bought/own my own modem and my own router, and I known that the modem doesn't come with an access point feature.
- BT does the same exact thing in the UK lol. I thought it was common knowledge

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 appreciate the exact price of $2.68.
  
  Why is this number everywhere?
- Who in the world is using a USB printer in 2023?
  Ethernet bby
  
  Who is using an Ethernet printer in 2024?
  Wifi bby
  
  Who in the world would put a cheap blackbox in their household and give it access to the internet.
  Selfhosted CUPS bby!
  The reasonably new android phones seem to detect unix network printers now, so wireless printing works as well. Mostly... we're talking about the printers after all.
  
  Those bastards like me that want reliability. I am willing to fight with the printer but not deal with the better half when that expensive shit box doesn't work
  
  my highschool robotics club :)
  we had a printer in our CAD area that we would just plug into whichever PC needed to print. it was pretty jank but worked, and that not the kind of thing worth spending money/effort on.
  
  All the people who deal with an IT department that has a brain explode if you ask them to go off DHCP.
- Same thing is true for a certain enthusiast PC store in the US except the margin is low on almost any high-ticket item.
- Aye this is 100% correct! I used to manage a store in NC. Also none of the tech services are actually done by the associates. We just attach a USB with a program for someone else to fix it remotely.
- I know I'm super late to the party, but everyone should know about Monoprice.com
  It's honestly my go-to website whenever I need audio cables, video cables, PC/laptop adaptors, or even network cables. But they offer a lot more than just cables.
  Let's say you need to buy a personal printer cable (USB-A to USB-B) at's 6 feet long. Office Depot's lowest price is just under $6. Best Buy's lowest price is $7.99. Staples' lowest cost offer is a bit over $3. Walmart's lowest price is just under $5. Amazon's lowest price (minus Monoprice items on the site,) is just under $7. Monoprice offers one 6 foot long printer cable for $1.99. And after adding the shipping cost for me, it came out to be $5.
- Also never buy HP or Canon. Their printers are designed to fail and extract money out of you. Better get Epson or Brother(best ecotank) or just get a laser one.
- This principle applies to many stores. If you shop at a mattress store the mattress pads are priced at triple the value.

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

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.

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

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 newspaper for a few years.
With very few exceptions, they do not give a fuck about you or the news. The advertisers are their customers and your attention is their product.

The people who negotiate your medical claims make more money on the settlement commissions than the doctors even make from their procedures.
And there’s like 25-40 people total who handle the claims for every single health insurance company.

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.

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.

I worked at an ISP. The DHCP server we use for our DSL offering was made in the 90s and hasn't been updated since.
- Frankly, I don't see this a a problem as long as the software is up to date and the hardware is sound. I bet there are thousands of SPARC servers out there processing data 24/7 since 1995.
  
  Might want to get on updating it soon for IPV6 though
- I've worked for a few of the larger ISPs in the US. They all have their own special weird shit like a windows NT machine shoved in a corner in a CO in west Texas that you have to remote desktop into and run some java applet from the 90 to log into a hardwired machine from the 70s just to set up a voicemail box for a phone line. Ain't broke don't fix it leads to some wild setups at companies you wouldn't expect it from.
  
  I'd actually rather this than making new software with all kinds of bugs
- If it works and is secure, what's the problem

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.

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 at a fruit processing plant. We found maggots in the blueberries. Line got shut down for obvious reasons.
Owner of the company came in and said 'pack them anyway'. We knowingly sent out blueberries with maggots in them.
Needless to say that company sucks and people hate working there.

A large pizza chain, it costs about $1 to make a large cheese pizza. Cheese is re-used as much as possible.
- How do you reuse cheese? That is concerning.
  
  If it was poured on the pizza and fell off, it's picked back up and put back in the bin if the health department allows it.
- To be fair, from a food-conservation standpoint, I’d expect cheese (and other materials) to be re-used. No need to throw it away just because it fell on a reasonably clean surface, especially prior to baking.
- Cheese? You mean processed ~~diary~~ dairy by-product?
- What does re use mean o.o
  
  They shower the pizza with cheese, and any cheese that doesn't land on top of the pizza is collected and used for the next. Pretty standard practice when making food
- That's why I stopped eating. Too much reused cheese.
- The extra is labor and the building? (And profit?)
  
  Also food waste, which tends to be high with pizza delivery.

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, 1234 was 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.

Everything comes in frozen. Before mixing with the sauces it smells off. Half the staff mix without gloves. Dont get the tuna but have it your way...
- Working at the morgue must have been tough
  
  An uncle of mine ran a funeral home. He and his staff took hygiene freaken seriously.
- I used exclusively go into subway for the tuna sandwich...

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

A national (not US) cake company uses expired ingredients because it's cheaper. Yes, I did report them to the authorities.

A certain fruit company knows about you WAY more than you can imagine, and most of the information is accessible to even the lowest ranks of support. And yeah, my NDA is finally over.

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

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.

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 worked for lumber liquidators, and their point of sale software seemed to be surplus navy because if you dug deep enough you could order nuclear sub parts.

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.
- "Can I have a free drink card?"
  
  No?! Then give me two if you want de-escalate the problem!
  No?! Then four!
- It hasn't changed. The profit is in loading your app with money and the data collected. I'm not an employee, just what I've heard.

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.

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 guy logged me into his user account
  It's pretty common to have this as the only barrier. If someone got into my work PC they could easily take down a lot of critical infrastructure, if they knew where to look.
  Terrible, but common.
  
  Yeah, getting access into the vpn and subsequently the server is the challenging part. Once you're in, there's so much that can be found quickly and somewhat easily.
- I work as a pentester and Red Teamer, I can attest that even for some large companies, you always stumble upon something that's just dumb, and completely renders their multi-million investment they are probably making into security tools and solutions worthless.
- Having worked network support, the number of times I've been on a screen share with someone who opens an excel sheet from the share drive that holds all the root passwords for every network device they own is high. A bad actor could take down some very large companies with some simple social engineering skills.
- Did you say in a 90s movie hacker voice, "I'm in."?
- It's shocking.
  Whenever we work with a 3rd party vendor and run through the efforts to harden the systems, they freak out because it always breaks their app. Then we go through the whole handholding process of getting their apps to work within our hardened environment. It ends with them not taking anything into account. App works, system is hardened. Then when it's time to update the system, they get involved and it's always back to square one.
  Like get the fuck on board with security if you are selling a software product. It's mind boggling thinking about how all their other customers just let them away with such exposed shitty communication and unencrypted passwords.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I used to work at a hotel and they never changed the duvet covers guest to guest, only the other sheets.

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

Back when I managed a Blockbuster Video, most stores ran at a loss thanks to theft.
The real reason most stores failed wasn't because DVDs were going out. It was because we couldn't stem the flow of money out the door thanks to thieves.
- Did they have the actual disc on the shelves? Where I'm from the rental places only displayed the cover, then you picked up the disc at the counter. Not sure how theft would've been a big problem then?
  
  I suspect it was not returning the DVDs. I'm not from the USA but recall hearing blockbuster wiped all their late fees..
- Isn't there insurance for theft?
  I call bullshit. Blockbuster died because it failed to adapt to the market.

We used to sell Windows built-in Recovery tool.

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