Ask Lemmy

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The first steel mill I worked for, the test requirements were more of a suggestion than a rigid specification. I, a trained and skilled engineer with the capacity to make informed decisions, had to run all rejections by my boss who would tell me "it's close enough" even if it wasn't. Sometimes it bit us in the ass with warranty failures, but the warranties were probably cheaper than internal rejections (and what is brand perception worth?).

My second steel mill job, I was the one making the rejection decisions. I did the hard thing and rejected our failures but I also troubleshot them to prevent recurrence, making our product and capability better over time.

It very much matters who you buy your steel from; two mills can have vastly different performance for the same products based on how they handle these situations.

I used to work at Starbucks (almost a decade ago now), but at the time, the motto was "just say yes" to any customer requests. We also had free drink cards that you could give out to deesclate any issue. So I would say any time you're even the slightest bit unhappy, bring it up, and you should at least have your problem solved, if not compensated for a free drink next time.

We also had customer satisfaction surveys that would print on reciepts, where filling one out would get the customer a free drink. We always kept them for customers that were happier to try and rig the odds in our favour of a higher rating, but also if a customer asked for one, I would give it if I had it. You could always ask the cashier if they have any of those as well.

Again, not sure how much either of those things have changed in the past 10 years, and I'm not sure how regional it was (this was in Canada at a corporately run store), but maybe worth a try.

Also I love these types of threads -- great topic to post.

I worked for a company that had an expensive San Jose lease during the .com bubble. When they decided they needed to get out of that lease, they folded the company - “fired” everyone, then re-hired everyone under an independent second company that was owned by the parent company. Sketchy, but not really surprising…

When they re-hired me, they didn’t have me sign any NDAs. All the old NDAs were with the company that folded, not the parent company. Some days I wish I had been unethical enough to sell off their source code to a competitor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

My previous employer - a multi-billion dollar internet search company would secretly listen to people's conversation via their mobile devices then place ads on the same devices (e.g in the browser search results or at the start of videos) based on keywords from the conversations, this had to be kept hidden of course and this large well-known company shall remain nameless.

I 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.

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

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 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

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.

It was me, I did it, I put that cheeky note on the noticeboard. I told the boss I accepted responsibility because I was in charge on that shift, but in fact it was me all along. Sorry Derek. (Not sorry.)

I used to work in a very large mortgage company in their website. The amount of tracking they do, the amount of information they have, just for mortgages, is astounding and frightening. We knew almost every detail about someone before they committed to a mortgage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you're doing a holiday in the USA and renting a car via enterprise, Alamo or national book with Rentalcars.com, unless you're flying with doing a Virgin package holiday, in Which case do it with them. They have the best rates in the market due to special agreements. If you want the best customer service experience for rental cars book with Virgin as they will put a lot of pressure on Alamo/national/enterprise who will bend over backwards for you.

i worked in a place where we put journal,magasin in leters and film. we got a DISGUSTING porn thing like... i dont even think it was legal (zoo ect) i personaly refuse to put that in envelope. and you know what? the most common adress we got? religious person. yup most recieve it was the one in church reading you the bibles...

I worked for a very large insurance company until recently . IT is run like the Wild West. Contractors seem to do whatever they want.  after a merger several years ago, all the people who built the systems were driven out, leaving a bunch of low paid outsourced contractors to support everything. The entire IT infrastructure is a bad day from collapsing.

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.

One company I worked at had more full-time collections people than sales people. Our products were a lot cheaper than our competitors, and it attracted a lot of customers with no money.

Another company I worked at ignored all "first notice" bills they ran up. CFO told me that if a company wanted paid, they needed to send a second notice.

People like me help to define, build, test, and support important services you use. Explains a lot.

I worked for an MSP doing IT for an assortment of companies. Most of the companies were in the medical or legal fields. Every single computer they sold to their clients, used the exact same bitlocker key when booting the computer. If you've worked for one of the companies we supported, you knew the bitlocker key for all of them. Iat been the exact same bitlocker key for at least 10 years. This MSP also regularly puts out social media posts and emails saying how security focused they are etc, etc.

My company is infested with cats. I think the CEO doesn't know about it.

Instagram allows employees to check on the accounts of the users and share that to other people. I didn't work there, but an employee told my girlfriend who I talked to before we were exclusive. I think that's total bullshit

I worked for a domain registrar and hosting company. The margins on their products are massive!

We would charge €75 for a domain recovery, while it would just cost €2 something to actually do. And the process was fully automated.

My boss was high 99% of the time he was at work.

Or awake.