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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 ;)
I worked at a 3rd party Apple retailer (they had a legacy contract from the 90s that only expired about 5-10 years ago) and they bought the cheapest RAM they could find to upgrade the Macs. They made hand over fist on RAM upgrades and still came in under what Apple charged for the same upgrade.
Isn’t the ram soldered? Is it too hard to upgrade?
if you have a hot air desoldering station it shouldn’t be too hard. but it’s a tool that most people aren’t going to have on hand.
You used to be able to just pop it out and swap. Those were the days
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.
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
Its really great if you like pepper. It puts out an absolute ton of it, and you’ll find yourself going through way more black pepper than you thought you ever could. And the grind settings are unrivaled; you can get tiny little faerie dusts of pepper, all the way up to big honkin flakes that work great on a steak. Whenever I’m doing a brisket or similar on the smoker, its great to have on hand
Its milled out of a single billet of aluminum, the grinding mechanism js custom built, and the whole thing just screams quality.
And you pay for it. They’re around $200
There’s also a salt cannon, if you want the same sort of thing but built for salt. I got it because I like the matching pair, but you don’t strictly need it; salt is salt, regardless of where it was ground.
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
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?
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.
Ye!
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).
This is your friendly reminder that the only person who went to jail for the diesel gate is the software developer who implemented the test-cheating practice. Not the managers, the directors who asked for it or anybody else
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.
Journalism died decades ago.
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 always say to the cashiers who are forced to ask us to donate that I will be donating directly to the charity online. Not through a multi million dollar company. When I think how a company does this for no other reason for free pr on other people’s coin, I have absolutely no guilt saying nope.
Oh, it’s more than PR. They get to donate your money and get the tax break for doing it.
I believe that is a hoax. Or at the very least misinformation. Although some areas might be different. It’s not a solid argument they are getting a tax break. PR is definitely why they do it across the board though.
This doesn’t surprise me at all, not even a little. You’re a multi million or billion dollar company and you’re asking me to provide charity that you can use as a tax break? Even if they were using it for charity it’s still a way to subsidize bottom line with customer money and “look” altruistic in the process.
They don’t get to use it as a tax break, you do. If they are doing fraud then that’s something else and they should be punished.
This is correct, there’s no tax break. They do it they can state “so and so corp donated 1.5 million Megabucks last year”. It’s all bullshit.
Some places don’t get a tax break but the free PR is very real.donate direct. Never through a company.
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
