Ask Lemmy

Worked support for an electricity supplier. I was able to see a frightening amount of info about the customers. Even past ones who had moved elsewhere.

We also kept notes about each call, email, web or app chat. So if you were an asshole in the past, everyone will know going forward.

Also fuck landlords and landladies etc. More often than not, they were shitty to deal with.

Also we would often use Google Maps and Streetview to see what your house looked like. We also had pictures of the inside because the installation techs took pictures to confirm that works were completed as specified.

Alll of this was available to us for any reason, at any time with no oversight. And none of it was encrypted. There was also government websites in use up to 2020 that required internet explorer to use and had passwords as trivial as 'Password1'.

I left that job because the pay was lousy and the stress was pretty full on. I respected a lot of people that worked there. Both higher ups and people who came after me. But fuck was there a lot of potential for bad actors or like stalkers etc to mess with your info.

I would reccomend to everyone. Please use password managers. Especially decent open source ones like Bitwarden. Take note of every piece of info that you give a company. From your phone number, address, email etc to even when you contacted them. Also try to not have your home look like an abandoned hovel on Streetview lol. Easier said than done I know. But it may affect your dealings with support people that you need help from. And lastly, please dont use Password1 as a login. Ever. Like please.

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.

The first steel mill I worked for, the test requirements were more of a suggestion than a rigid specification. I, a trained and skilled engineer with the capacity to make informed decisions, had to run all rejections by my boss who would tell me "it's close enough" even if it wasn't. Sometimes it bit us in the ass with warranty failures, but the warranties were probably cheaper than internal rejections (and what is brand perception worth?).

My second steel mill job, I was the one making the rejection decisions. I did the hard thing and rejected our failures but I also troubleshot them to prevent recurrence, making our product and capability better over time.

It very much matters who you buy your steel from; two mills can have vastly different performance for the same products based on how they handle these situations.

We used to sell Windows built-in Recovery tool.

My wife worked at a pretty well-known hiking supplies store in our country. The retail price is sometimes over x4 the manufacturing cost and extremely marked up. The amount of faulty products with manufacturing faults is really high, with the suppliers 100% aware but gave the stores discounts on the wholesale price just to push units, even though the clothes/bags/shoes would break after a year or so of light use.

I work for a MSP that works a lot with very large tech companies. Most of these companies outsource a lot of work to India. I frequently have to remote in and help them with our product. You'll see passwords in plain text being thrown around in teams chats, .txt documents on the desktop and emails like candy. I will frequently work with individuals with titles like "Cloud Engineer" to "Solutions Expert" that I swear have never opened a terminal window in their life and unable to follow basic IT instructions. I have worked with a lot of very good Indian engineers, but I swear chronyism has a lot of people put into positions that they aren't really qualified for.

Military equipment is sold to the PRC and mislabeled as COTS, i.e. civilian.

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.

Worked in tech support for a major internet provider. We would constantly have major ouages in various locations due to overtaxed systems going down. Corporate refused to allow us to admit that there were problems on our end and forced the techs to troubleshoot the customer calls, even though we all knew that we could do nothing for the customer. Saw multiple techs releived of their job for telling the truth to the customers. So many hours wasted on both the customer and techs part.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Or awake.

Not strictly a company secret, but I had to sign an NDA for it, because... reasons.

I used to work for a massive conglomerate, these guys are making from components for satellites and tank to rubber gloves for hospitals, and everything in between. My job was to help the company implement regulations, work with auditors and generally follow product specific rules.

So I was on these 2 New Product Development teams and because the products needed some very specific testing equipment, we started working with local authorities and some contractors to build the testing station in the future factory. We drafted plans, prepare documents, we had an auditor come and see the place, the contractor came and checked what he needed to do, everything was going according to plan.

While all of this was happening, I was on a separate project where we were working on closing down the above mentioned factory.