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

Why is everyone here afraid to name the companies?

Unless you're sharing something that only you would know and the company is aware that you're the only one who knows it, there's no way they can identify you.

Something tells me the people posting here who had "NDAs" didn't actually have any sort of a high level clearance to important information.

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.

They let the intern access the production db. The company is one of the biggest hosting and internet service companies in the country. The db was SQL but had no primary key.

I was the intern. I normalized it to 3NF as part of my internship project.

Chinese delivery doughnuts in the US are just deep fried canned biscuits.

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 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.

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).

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.

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.

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 as a pastor and professor for a global, evangelical television ministry/college. They knowingly conceal scholarship on the Bible and punish their pastors for asking any questions that undermine their most closely held traditions (including anti-evolution, mental illness is supernatural, etc.). They tell their US viewers that they can't call themselves Christians if they don't vote Republican, while still enjoying tax-exempt status. They use pseudohistorians to inspire Christian Nationalism over their network, and are one of the largest propaganda networks for the Religious Right. A U.S. Capitol police commander told me his men were fighting people who were wearing the network's brand.

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.

Our SSL implementation never checks the certificates, largely defeating the purpose of SSL.

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.

Certain search engine company was a badly managed, bureaucratic slog of an ads-driven soulless corporation for way longer than people think.

S&P and Moody's were collaborating since at least 2000 on the pricing of the so-called "esoteric" structured instruments associated with mortgaged-backed securities that caused the 4Q07 crash. They collaborated via the competitive intelligence firm Washington Information Group (which does not seem to be around anymore.) The collaboration was almost certainly illegal (IANAL). They did this because neither wanted a price war when rating these. I did sign an NDA with S&P that kept me out of the industry for two years. I left the industry shortly after that and went back to what I used to do.

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.

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".

Just remembered another one:

Have you ever had an anonymous survey sent to you by your work or by a company your work has hired? They're not anonymous. Management knows what your opinions are and will use them against you.

I worked for a consultant that would try and help fix businesses. The worst example I can think of was when I saw one person had answered a survey question saying that their employer had a "blame culture". Rather than trying to work on the processes or address why something had gone wrong, staff would start pointing fingers to keep out of trouble. This didn't fix anything and only made people spend all the time covering their posteriors.

The manager called a general meeting of everyone at that site and then singled out the employee who'd mentioned the blame culture, blaming him for saying there was a blame culture. The employee then pointed out that they'd been told, in writing, that the survey was anonymous. That employee called the manager a liar and then she lost control of the meeting, with lots of employees calling her a liar and several storming out. They weren't in business the next year.