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 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.

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.

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

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.

I know this thread is old but: so many HIPPA violations, oh my God. I am a pediatric therapists/child psych, and the clinic I used to work at constantly stored client data in the most insecure ways, and therapists and staff would discuss client names, diagnosis’, address, EVERYTHING openly in the break room. I complained at one point, but it went nowhere. Turns out nobody cares, lol. They also frequently ignored the best interests of our clients to maximize profit from insurance (leaning towards fraud). I ultimately left the company when my boss blatantly violated the safety of one of my clients by refusing to send her home when she had a fever of 104 F. Sure, working with kids means everyone gets sick a lot, but when the child is THAT sick, they need to be in a hospital, not in a hot, cramped room with a therapist.

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

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.

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.

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.

My boss was high 99% of the time he was at work.

Or awake.

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 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.

Nice try fbi

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.