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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

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 worked for an online payment company you all know. Many eployees have access to the main DB which holds all transactions and names and everything in clear text. You could basically find out all PII (personal identification information) of any celebrity you wanted given they had anaccount. Address, phone number, credit card and all. If you knew a bit of SQL you could basically find whoever person you wanted and get purchase history and all.

Cant say I didnt use this to find stuff about my exes or various celebrities.

A national (not US) cake company uses expired ingredients because it’s cheaper. Yes, I did report them to the authorities.

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.

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.

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 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.

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