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.
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.
I did some IT work at a hospital, patient records including names, addresses, conditions and doctor’s notes (inc mental health notes) were stored in the database in plain text. You had to have admin access to the database (which I did), but I was stunned that I could browse anyone’s entire medical information. A few weeks after I left I sent an anonymous email to a couple of people letting them know how bad it was - I didn’t use my real one just in case they may have come after me for looking at the records.
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.
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 last company I worked for has both NDA’s and arbitration agreements, which would keep me from spilling company secrets and would screw me over if I did. But here is a secret - they use online PDF forms and <whispers> don’t check what text is entered into the signature.
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.
Military equipment is sold to the PRC and mislabeled as COTS, i.e. civilian.
One company I worked at had more full-time collections people than sales people. Our products were a lot cheaper than our competitors, and it attracted a lot of customers with no money.
Another company I worked at ignored all “first notice” bills they ran up. CFO told me that if a company wanted paid, they needed to send a second notice.
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.
About 25 years ago I worked in a small town KFC franchise. Owner was, well, what you’d expect in a small town franchise owner - there was lots of pressure to cut costs and the manager had their job threatened at least once a month due to cost overruns (which cut into the owner’s profits).
Manager quote, “I don’t care if it’s green, cook it anyway, nobody will tell once it’s breaded and fried.”
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.
i dont think it was a secret for anything
but i once went to a job interview at a phone support line for an ISP in my country
it turned out to be … a sales department. basically that’s what they called it. all support calls had to eventually lead into selling something.
that just seems so idiotic i couldn’t deal with it
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.
I used to work in a very large mortgage company in their website. The amount of tracking they do, the amount of information they have, just for mortgages, is astounding and frightening. We knew almost every detail about someone before they committed to a mortgage.
