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[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 291 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] Tar_alcaran@lemmy.world 95 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] esadatari@lemmy.world 247 points 1 year ago

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

[-] bleistift2@feddit.de 43 points 1 year ago

Not to put the blame on the devs, but the problems might have been attenuated by defining a proper interface layer against the server.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 84 points 1 year ago

It's a damn single player game 💀

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[-] thrawn21@lemmy.world 211 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.one 65 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] dammitBobby@lemm.ee 51 points 1 year ago

We're house shopping and there has been a house on a lake sitting on the market forever. I got curious and researched the lake and... It's a literal superfund site. The company that was on the other side of the lake just dumped their waste chemicals right on the shore and it has polluted both the lake and ground water forever essentially because they don't break down. I looked up the previous owner... Died of cancer. The shit that companies are and were allowed to get away with is just insane. Meanwhile right wing nut jobs want to get rid of the EPA (which was ironically created by Richard Nixon).

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[-] Tar_alcaran@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] nix@merv.news 37 points 1 year ago

What are they poisoned with and how does it happen?

[-] thrawn21@lemmy.world 58 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Varies depending on the site, sometimes it's gasoline, or solvents, or heavy metals or PFAS. As for how it happens, accidental or deliberate releases. I've found military documents from the 50s that say the official place to dispose of used motor oil was a pit they'd dug in the ground.

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[-] Whitebrow@lemmy.world 190 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Littleborat@feddit.de 46 points 1 year ago

I think we work in the same company, the dude does not smell funny to me but maybe that's just me.

[-] gjoel@lemmy.ml 32 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] shadesdk@lemmy.ml 166 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[-] LucasWaffyWaf@lemmy.world 113 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] MrBodyMassage@lemmy.world 112 points 1 year ago

There is a million times more counterfeit/fake items at amazon than you think, and they dont care one bit to fix the problem

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[-] YourHuckleberry@lemmy.world 84 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 81 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The buildings alarm code was 0711. Guess where I worked....

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[-] kn33@lemmy.world 78 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 74 points 1 year ago

I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with "bombast". They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word "infinity". Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you're a Bombast customer, you're helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.

Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.

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[-] Ubettawerk@lemmy.blahaj.zone 66 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] shittymorph@lemmy.world 66 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] Draksis@lemmy.world 64 points 1 year ago

A large pizza chain, it costs about $1 to make a large cheese pizza. Cheese is re-used as much as possible.

[-] Entheon@lemmy.world 44 points 1 year ago

How do you reuse cheese? That is concerning.

[-] kn33@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago

If it was poured on the pizza and fell off, it's picked back up and put back in the bin if the health department allows it.

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[-] Zeyfert162@lemmy.world 63 points 1 year ago

Everything comes in frozen. Before mixing with the sauces it smells off. Half the staff mix without gloves. Dont get the tuna but have it your way...

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[-] tired_n_bored@lemmy.world 57 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[-] forgotaboutlaye@lemmy.world 57 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] zuhayr@lemmy.world 57 points 1 year ago

An AI company... They used to manually change system event logs to show it wasn't their software that caused the downtime for our clients.

Bought over a million dollars worth hardware (25% of which didn't even got racked), over 200 46inch LED screens that no one used, and very expensive offices at posh locations in the bid to increase its IPO valuation.

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[-] netvor@lemmy.world 53 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The building, used by several hundred employees, had a security systems with 4-digit codes. I've been part of group of people who liked to work late times, and the building would lock at midnight -- the box by the door would start beeping and you would need to unlock it within a minute or so, or "proper alarm" would ensue.

However, to unlock the alarm you did not need your card -- all you needed to do was to enter any valid code. Guess what was the chance that, say, 1234 was someone's valid code? Yes.

We've been all using some poor guy's code 1234, and after several years, when he left the company we just guessed some other obvious code (4321) and kept using that.

By the way, after entering the code to the box by the door, it would shortly display name of the person whom the code "belonged" to. One of our colleagues took it as a personal secret project to slowly go through all 10000 possible codes and collect the names of the people, just for the kick of it.

(By the way, I don't work for that company anymore, and more importantly, the company does not use that building anymore, so don't get any ideas! 🙃 )

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[-] TemporaryBoyfriend@lemmy.ca 50 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] DuckDuckGoneForGood@lemmy.world 49 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] RGB3x3@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

The US healthcare and insurance industry is such a scam. There are so many people making so much money off denying claims and overcharging for procedures.

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[-] pureness@lemmy.world 48 points 1 year ago

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 ;)

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[-] iso@lemy.lol 48 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] popemichael@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Boozilla@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] seraphelven@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] alphacyberranger@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] PlaidBaron@lemmy.world 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[-] TechyDad@lemmy.world 37 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] Louisoix@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] dgmib@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[-] gerudox@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago

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.

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[-] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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).

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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
672 points (99.3% liked)

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