Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Depending upon your position you have an NDA that either has a date or never expires. I have worked for companies that I have NDAs with that never expire. Be careful what you share.

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

A friend of mine was a manager at a fairly upscale women's clothing store.

She said that even at 95% discounts, they could turn a profit.

We used to sell Windows built-in Recovery tool.

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.

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.

Military equipment is sold to the PRC and mislabeled as COTS, i.e. civilian.

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.

The amount of school districts and city govts. that use Google docs for everything is terrifying. I'm talking plain text student info and billing information.

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.

They actually kept the domain admin password on a post-it under 2 different keyboards. One of which was secured from the public.

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..

When I worked at Bob Evans I watched a manager peel the expiration dates off of expired food and replace them with dates in the future to avoid waste.

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.

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 don't check what text is entered into the signature.

They let the intern access the production db. The company is one of the biggest hosting and internet service companies in the country. The db was SQL but had no primary key.

I was the intern. I normalized it to 3NF as part of my internship project.