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.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah I’m in Europe and our customers were municipalities buying healthcare related solutions. It happened after our little startup got taken over by a big player and they started getting involved in the contract bids.
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.
We used to live near a furniture store. It had a going out of business sale when we moved in. The sale was still going on when we moved out 6 years later. Then I started noticing how many other furniture stores seemed to be having going out of business sales.
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.
So glad I never got google play. Thanks for the confirmation that was the right choice.
I recently discovered that somehow I set up billing for a VPN directly from the company and also through Google Play. I probably got a renewal email and just followed the instructions. I went back through my bank statements and I’ve been double charged for probably at least 2 years and just never noticed it. It was only about $10 a month. I just feel really stupid for not noticing it until now and it’s entirely my fault. I cancelled the one through Google Play. You live and you learn!
lmfao. Does the VPN company’s name start with a W by any chance? If so, I am very aware of that issue as well. 😂
Name and shame!
just guessing here but sounds like the rain forest company.
I’m guessing that if you have the right kind of Pal, you could figure out a way to Pay them to help you figure it out…
I guessing it’s Amazon’s old android app store? I remember lots of users having a lot of hope for that app store bringing competition and higher quality app and app store quality. Oh how naive we were.
deleted by creator
AOL was fined some small amount for this exact thing.
This has GOT to be Shopify
✅️ is a shopping platform
✅️ has an app ecosystem with a billing api
✅️ high probability that someone who shops online has interacted with a store on the platform
✅️ multiple rounds of layoffs w/ staff stretched thin
✅️ unclear ambitions of being a megaplatform, beyond what it already is
I guess we’ll never know, lol
I’m unfortunately dependent upon said company, as a “partner”, which just means a hack indie developer who herds customers to the slaughter for the corp.
The last round of layoffs was a brutal experience for the “Plus” customers. They lost crucial advisers and support, and now the guidance available is a bored and untrained chat support thrall on the other side of the world, or a stochastic parrot.
You can smell the enshittification from here. The vendor lock-in is so intense it seemed inevitable.
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
Just like hospitals, that money is going straight to the top and staying there.
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!
What do they call those in other countries?
If I had to guess, ‘railway’.
A lot of US freight railroads seem to love to manage themselves into the ground.
The buildings alarm code was 0711. Guess where I worked…
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.
This isn’t bound to one production company. Close to every car video prod does this if there’s expected damage.
This sounds like Alarm für Cobra 11 😅
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.
In Belgium we have a law stating that no commerce can ever sell at a loss. Yet we still see 70% discounts, in stores for every budget range.
Yet we still see 70% discounts, in stores for every budget range.
I bet those stores also claim that prices need to go up “because of inflation”. Fraudsters.
Worked support for an electricity supplier. I was able to see a frightening amount of info about the customers. Even past ones who had moved elsewhere.
We also kept notes about each call, email, web or app chat. So if you were an asshole in the past, everyone will know going forward.
Also fuck landlords and landladies etc. More often than not, they were shitty to deal with.
Also we would often use Google Maps and Streetview to see what your house looked like. We also had pictures of the inside because the installation techs took pictures to confirm that works were completed as specified.
Alll of this was available to us for any reason, at any time with no oversight. And none of it was encrypted. There was also government websites in use up to 2020 that required internet explorer to use and had passwords as trivial as ‘Password1’.
I left that job because the pay was lousy and the stress was pretty full on. I respected a lot of people that worked there. Both higher ups and people who came after me. But fuck was there a lot of potential for bad actors or like stalkers etc to mess with your info.
I would reccomend to everyone. Please use password managers. Especially decent open source ones like Bitwarden. Take note of every piece of info that you give a company. From your phone number, address, email etc to even when you contacted them. Also try to not have your home look like an abandoned hovel on Streetview lol. Easier said than done I know. But it may affect your dealings with support people that you need help from. And lastly, please dont use Password1 as a login. Ever. Like please.
i would recommend Keepass
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.
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
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.)
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=-wpHszfnJns
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
How does this work? Had someone already uploaded it to an instance of peertube?
From what I can understand, it’s just youtube with another frontend (i.e. it’s an app that shows youtube content)
That’s pretty much the only BDG video I couldn’t finish. Too dark. Everything else has been delightful
I did finish it but I need like at the beginning without understandong anything. Lucky for me I am not in USA.
I don’t think I’ve finished it either tbh
We need to move to single payer healthcare and just eliminate the need for insurance companies.
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 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.
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.
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?
No he is many things including functioning alcoholic and a choleric but I could not detect strong odor.
I do not know what my thing is because that’s obviously my blind spot.
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.
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.
I worked for a company like that. Wall Street shits bought us up and sold everything that wasn’t bolted down.
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.
Thai is basically my current team, haha.
Can confirm. I am the smelly guy. Leave me alone and you get code. Bother me and you don’t.
