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.
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”
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?
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.
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”.
Oh, so like ambulances in the USA.
“The ambulance had issues making it unsafe (or even illegal) to drive? But it can still drive down the road? Doesn’t seem too bad: keep an eye on it.”
You’d think they’d have money to keep it pristine, with how much a short ambulance ride costs in the USA
With the amount of money a 3 mile ambulance trip costs, you could buy a beater car and drive yourself there.
US? Or somewhere else? Not saying that it doesn’t happen other places just curious.
The use of ‘railroad’ instead of ‘railway’ would seem to indicate American English
There’s three ways to do a job. The right way, the wrong way, and the rail way. Also it was the great white north!
The buildings alarm code was 0711. Guess where I worked…
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.
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.
Any chance to get to know which one? :)
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.
Worked in tech support for a satellite based Internet company that oversold its bandwidth on one of the satellites.
We told customers on that beam we were working on it. The actual solution was attrition. Eventually enough customers would quit that service would be better for those that remained.
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
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 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
Used to work in garden/hardware supply company. The best selling product cost $16 for manufacturing and delivery to our warehouse from China. They would sell in [national hardware chain] for $699. It was about a 40% markup in store, the rest of that $699 was eaten up by warehousing, shipping and staffing costs. If you couldn’t move that product in a reasonable timeframe then you’d start losing money on warehouse costs.
I figure most items I’ve purchased are 40% profit, 50% warehouse/shipping/staffing, 10% manufacturing/import.
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
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 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.
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 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. 🤬
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
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.
