• shittymorph@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • esadatari@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

  • rtxn@lemmy.world
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    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.

    • Tar_alcaran@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The library I worked for as a teen used to process off-site reservations by writing them to a text file, which was automatically e-faxed to all locations every odd day.

      If you worked at not-the-main-location, you couldn’t do an off-site reservation, so on even days, you would print your list and fax it to the main site, who would re-enter it into the system.

      This was 2005. And yes, it broke every month with an odd number of days.

    • SSTF@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      downtime

      minimal retraining

      I feel your pain. Many good ideas that cause this are rejected. I have had ideas requiring one big downtime chunk rejected even though it reduces short but constant downtimes and mathematically the fix will pay for itself in a month easily.

      Then the minimal retraining is frustrating when work environments and coworkers still pretend computers are some crazy device they’ve never seen before.

      • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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        1 year ago

        Places like that never learn their lesson until The Event™ happens. At my last place, The Event™ was a derecho that knocked out power for a few days, and then when it came back on, the SAN was all kinds of fucked. On top of that, we didn’t have backups for everything because they didn’t want to pay for more storage. They were losing like $100K+ every hour they were down.

        The speed at which they approved all-new hardware inside a colocation facility after The Event™ was absolutely hilarious, I’d never seen anything approved that quickly.

        Trust me, they’re going to keep putting it off until you have your own version of The Event™, and they’ll deny that they ever disregarded the risk of it happening in the first place, even though you have years’ worth of emails saying “If we don’t do X, Y will occur.” And when when Y occurs, they’ll scream “Oh my God, Y has occurred, no one could have ever foreseen this!”

        It’ll happen. Wait and watch.

        • DigitalAudio@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Sounds like a universal experience for pretty much all fields of work.

          Government and policy? Climate change? A fucking pandemic?!

          We’ve seen it all happen time and time again. People in positions of authority get overconfident that if things are working right now, they’ll keep working indefinitely. And then despite being warned for decades, when things finally break, they’ll claim no one could have foreseen the consequences of their lack of responsibility. Some people will even chime in and begin theorising that surely, those that warned them, had to be responsible for all the chaos. It was an act of sabotage, and not of foresight.

        • SSTF@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Places I’m at usually end up bricking robots and causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage to them because they insist on running the robot without allowing small fixes.

          Usually a big robot crash will be The Event that teaches people to respect early warning signs…for about 3 months. Then the old attitude slides back.

          Good thing we aren’t building something that requires precision, like semi-conductor wafers. Oh wait.

          • Osnapitsjoey@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            That’s just be on them losing tons and tons of money from bad usable platter space lol they’re machine gunning themselves in the legs

    • bleistift2@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests

      I’m not an infrastructure person. If the receiving web server doesn’t log the URI, and supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS, which removes the credentials from the URI, are there security concerns?

      • nudelbiotop@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Anyone who has access to any involved network infrastructure can trace the cleartext communication and extract the credentials.

      • ItsMyFirstDay@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m not 100% on this but I think GET requests are logged by default.

        POST requests, normally used for passwords, don’t get logged by default.

        BUT the Uri would get logged would get logged on both, so if the URI contained @username:Password then it’s likely all there in the logs

        • bleistift2@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          GET requests are logged

          That’s why I specified

          the receiving web server doesn’t log the URI

          in my question.

        • SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Get and post requests are logged

          The difference is that the logged get requests will also include any query params

          GET /some/uri?user=Alpha&pass=bravo

          While a post request will have those same params sent as part of a form body request. Those aren’t logged and so it would look like this

          POST /some/uri

      • rtxn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Nope, it’s bare-ass HTTP. The server software also connected to an LDAP server.

      • netvor@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I would still not sleep well; other things might log URI’s to different unprotected places. Depending on how the software works, this might be client, but also middleware or proxy…

      • Archer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS

        I can practically guarantee you it was not

      • nijave@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Browser history

        Even if the destination doesn’t log GET components, there could be corporate proxies that MITM that might log the URL. Corporate proxies usually present an internally trusted certificate to the client.

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      1 year ago

      As weird as it may seem, this might be a good argument in favor of Pascal. I despised learning it at uni, as it seems worthless, but is seems that it can still handle business-critical software for 20 years.

      • Overzeetop@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What OP didn’t tell you is that, due to its age, it’s running on an unpatched WinXP SP2 install and patching, upgrading to SP3, or to any newer Windows OS will break the software calls that version of Pascal relies upon.

        • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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          You’re literally describing the system that controlled employee keyscan badges a couple of jobs ago…

          That thing was fun to try and tie into the user disable/termination script that I wrote. I ended up having to just manipulate its DB tables manually in the script instead of going through an API that the software exposed, because it didn’t do that. Figuring out their fucked-up DB schema was an adventure on its own too.

          • Overzeetop@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I’m also describing the machine in my office that runs my $20,000 laser plotter/large format scanner. The software in the machine uses (Java?) over a web interface which was deprecated and removed from all browsers around 2012-14, iirc. The machine isn’t supported anymore and the only way to clear an error or update where it sends scans is using that interface. I have a XPSP2 machine running the internal IE6 browser which will still display the interface. Since I’m now a one-person office, and I use the scanner about 6 times a year, I keep that machine around in case I need to turn it on to update the scanner or clear a print error. Buying a new plotter isn’t worth the time/money - when it dies I’ll just farm out the work to a 3rd party vendor; but while it does work it’s convenient to have in-house.

            • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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              1 year ago

              If it’s that old, I’m betting it doesn’t use HTTPS for its connections. You could do a network packet capture on the XP machine (or if you can find one, hook it up to a network hub with another computer attached and capture there) while performing the “clear error” action and find out how it works/what you need to send to it to clear the error. You could also set up a SPAN port on a switch and mirror the traffic on the port going to the printer to capture the traffic, if you have a switch capable of doing that. If not, you can get one off Amazon for about $100.

              It’d be pretty simple to put together a script that sends the “clear error” action to the printer after seeing how it’s done in the packet capture. I’ve done this numerous times, the latest of which was for a network-connected temperature sensor that I wanted to tie into but didn’t (publicly) expose an API of any kind.

              • Overzeetop@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                It’s more than that, though - it’s used to setup custom sheet widths as well as enter new server and login details for sending scans via FTP to a server. If I’m doing billable work, I’m charging $225/hr. If I’m snooping the network, which isn’t my field and I do almost never so it takes me several times longer than an expert, I’m making nothing. With an annual value on the machine’s services at less than $500 (more than half of which would become reimbursable if I didn’t have it), there’s no actual value in “fixing” it by creating a different work around. 🤷‍♂️

  • pureness@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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 ;)

  • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    1-800-got-junk? doesn’t care at all about its environmental impact. No sorting what so ever happens to what goes on their trucks it all goes to landfills. All the ads will say they recycle and that they repurpose old furniture but I was threatened with being fired when I recommended donating antiques instead of dumping a load of furniture.

    More jobs and more profits comes before anything else in that company, including employee health and safety. Several times I was told to enter spaces we werent trained for (attics and crawl spaces) and carry waste I legally couldn’t transport (human/organic wastes and the laws states the driver is fined, not the company). One guy injured his shoulder during an attic job and was told to finish the shift or lose his job. Absoulte scum of a company with very sleazy management and possibly the labour board in their pocket as they kept “losing the files” when I tried to file a report with buddy’s shoulder (he was hesistant to report for fear of losing his job).

  • TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • MrBodyMassage@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    There is a million times more counterfeit/fake items at amazon than you think, and they dont care one bit to fix the problem

    • Sharkwellington@lemmy.one
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      I recall watching a video about the nature of how things are stored at Amazon warehouses - basically if there are multiple sellers offering the same item it all goes in the same bin. Even if you are providing a genuine product, there’s a very good chance one of the other sellers is not, and that counterfeit gets sent out attached to your seller ID. Then you get a complaint for selling a counterfeit item someone else provided.

      Then when that seller is caught and booted, they just register another trademark with 5-10 random characters and do it again. This is causing a massive headache for the US Trademark Office as well.

      • Alethe Crow@sh.itjust.works
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        Having worked for Amazon across multiple facilities. This is not true or at least wasn’t. When stowing everything seemed pretty random for spots. Seemed to be where ever there was space. But the items themselves when not sold directly by Amazon use a different set of numbers than the B00 number I think it is an FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) number.

        That being said, just going to the bathroom was enough to tank the rate for day and have to play catch-up. Lunches reset this.

        In one facility they caught two people in a Gaylord having some relations. Same facility they found a used sex toy that had biological material.

    • Paradox@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      I bought a pepper grinder called the Pepper Cannon. Yes, its wonderfully overengineered and costs a fortune. But it’s made in the USA, and they’ve been pretty open with their startup process for making it.

      Few months ago I was browsing across amazon and lo and behold, some pepper grinders that look identical to the pepper cannon came up. They were all cheaper knockoffs, selling for a fraction of the cost, and outright stealing PCs industrial design. I didn’t buy one, as I don’t need one and didn’t really care enough to test if the mechanism was the same as the one I bought, but I did drop a line to the pepper cannon guys so they can try to get em delisted

      • Mikina@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Now I want a Pepper Cannon. Would you recommend getting it, before I ruin my hype by looking up the price or what is actually is? :D

        • Paradox@lemdro.id
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          Its really great if you like pepper. It puts out an absolute ton of it, and you’ll find yourself going through way more black pepper than you thought you ever could. And the grind settings are unrivaled; you can get tiny little faerie dusts of pepper, all the way up to big honkin flakes that work great on a steak. Whenever I’m doing a brisket or similar on the smoker, its great to have on hand

          Its milled out of a single billet of aluminum, the grinding mechanism js custom built, and the whole thing just screams quality.

          And you pay for it. They’re around $200

          There’s also a salt cannon, if you want the same sort of thing but built for salt. I got it because I like the matching pair, but you don’t strictly need it; salt is salt, regardless of where it was ground.

          • Mikina@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Interresting. Looks like I have one of those knock-offs, I suppose we got it in a supermarket or something :D But I realize that paying for quality in something that includes any kind of razors will make a notable difference, so I guess the price can be justified.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      I think there’s a lot, yet I also don’t doubt you.

      'Course, at this point so much of the stuff is the same randomly-generated-brand-name Chinese shit as EBay and Aliexpress have anyway that it doesn’t really matter anymore most of the time.

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      1 year ago

      I wrote a review about a counterfeit item I received. They never approved that one. I haven’t bought cologne from them since.

      • limelight79@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I bought a bicycle light set (front and rear) a few years ago. They work fine (in fact, I still use the headlight; the rear still works, but it was replaced by a radar light), and I wrote a review. More recently, I was looking back through my purchases, and I came across the review I’d written, but the lights they were now selling on that page were a completely different design than the ones I had.

        I edited my review to note that the current lights didn’t match the ones I had, not that it’ll do any good with a million other reviews of those lights. I know Amazon doesn’t really care, but I very often see “There is a newer version of this item available here” links, so I’m surprised that this was possible.

    • ohlaph@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Exactly why I only buy from Amazon when I can’t find it after searching elsewhere for a while.

    • netvor@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I always thought there’s exactly 0 counterfeit/fake items at amazon, so … 0 times million … phew…

      /s

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      1 year ago

      they dont care one bit to fix the problem

      Who is they? Warehouse workers? Because without getting into too many details, I know someone fairly high up at Amazon corporate, and if I recall correctly her colleague runs a whole…divison? I don’t know, largish multi-person unit…and their whole job is addressing the counterfeit problem. I think it’s just really hard to do.

      • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Amazon has a policy of binning items with the same UPC together, regardless of the source. What this means is if you buy a valid product and any vendor who is part of their warehouse storage system sells counterfeits, then there is a chance of you getting a counterfeit part, regardless of who you buy from. This reduces the number of locations required for a given item. It just requires that you trust your vendors to not counterfeit. If they were kept separate you could easily see who is selling counterfeits, but it would require more space.

        So Amazon has traded the ability to sell parts from verifiable vendors for short-term profits. At this point in the game, your best assumption is if there is any knock-off company selling the product you wish to buy you have no way of knowing it it’s legitimate or counterfeit. This is currently diluting their brand and will ultimately impact their sales, if not their profits.

        • squozenode@lemmy.world
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          Amazon makes something like 80% of their profit off of Amazon web services. They have no reason to give the tiniest crap about any physical product they will ever sell ever again.

          • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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            Yes, and I recall an interview with a bank over a decade ago where someone asked why they have service charges when all it seems to do is piss off their customers. He tried to dismiss the significance of service charges by pointing out that they only represent 15% of their revenue. And yet they still have service charges.

            The reason both these things happen is because profits are put above everything else, no matter how small they are or how irritating they are to the customer. Rest assured, Amazon is no different. They will happily engage in practices that encourage counterfeit sales until such time as they have indications that dealing with it will improve their bottom line. Even 1% will be worth it, let alone 20.

      • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Well the easiest solution is to go back to having Amazon be the seller of products on Amazon, but we all one that ship sailed.

        But if the problem is shared bin storage, the solution isn’t free, but it’s also not as expensive as lots of buyer confidence:

        Tag every item with a QR code indicating its source when it comes into the distribution center. Use that code to identify the bad actors when there are returns and ban them.

        “But what about products not shipped by Amazon?”

        In that case, you know who sold and shipped the product, and if they can’t get their shit together they shouldn’t be allowed to work with Amazon.

    • Hello Hotel@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Random advice: if the market for your product is already lousy with scams without amazon, dont by it on amazon!

    • wildebeesties@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      One of the major issues is counterfeit baby products, specifically sleep products. In the US, sleep spaces for babies are highly regulated. The terms “bassinet, crib, and playard” are terms that can only be used for products that pass rigorous ASTM testing. If something doesn’t complete that testing then they are not allowed to use one of those terms in ads or on their manual. This is why you’ll see many products listed as “loungers” because they’re not safe for sleep. There are hundreds of products online that are horribly made and steal manuals of actual approved products. Amazon is notified (groups I’m in notify them) and they don’t care. There are also products that aren’t knock-off versions of things but just flat out lie and say a product is safe for sleep when it isn’t and will use one of the protected terms - which makes the sale of them illegal.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Health insurance company I worked for would automatically reject claims over a certain amount without reviewing them. Just to be dicks and make people have to resubmit. This was over 25 years ago, but it’s my understanding many health insurers still pull this shit. They don’t care if it’s legal or not. Enforcement is lazy and fines are cheaper than medical claims.

    Obviously this is in the USA.

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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Whitebrow@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Littleborat@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I think we work in the same company, the dude does not smell funny to me but maybe that’s just me.

        • Littleborat@feddit.de
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          No he is many things including functioning alcoholic and a choleric but I could not detect strong odor.

          I do not know what my thing is because that’s obviously my blind spot.

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        We all work for that company. Except at mine, I work remote, so I have only myself to blame the stinkiness on.

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      When you have a great programmer working on your project he will be cycled to a new project in 2-3 months. Your new senior developer who silently takes over the project is part time because he’s working on finishing his education.

      No one knows how anything works, except that one guy, who left the company half a year ago. That’s how all software development is.

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        Throw in a mysterious comment that says “Don’t change anything below this line or everything breaks” and it’s complete.

        “We don’t know why this works, but it does, don’t touch it.” would also be acceptable.

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          1 year ago

          “The server mangles the authentication token after receiving it for reasons we don’t really understand, so this function just checks to see that it’s set in the request, but nothing actually cares if it’s valid. DO NOT RETURN USER ACCOUNT DATA HERE AND YES THAT MEANS YOU MARCUS”

    • what@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Programming teams I’ve worked with are a joke.

      Company A: We got hacked and the lead dev argued for days it wasn’t a hack. Malware was actively being served to customers during this time period because she refused to deal with it and there was no security team.

      Company B: programming team was the IT guys nephew and some random UI designer who hadn’t finished college and was never able to be employed after finishing college…

      Company C: We interviewed a candidate who was way over qualified and would make our life so easy because he was eager and hungry. Instead we hired a bootcamper who had never heard of docker (half our infra is docker), react, or anything other than vanilla JavaScript. She failed our practical but still got hired because the hiring manager wanted and assistant. She has become a glorified project manager, but still has the title software engineer.

    • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      In my company we have a very modern agile workflow where QA is top priority.

      At least that what we advertise. In reality it’s all an unorganized clusterfuck where I’m pretty sure I am the only one who bothers to write automated tests. Who’s got time to write tests bro just push that shit out ASAP we’ll deal with it when the client calls us in the middle of the night to complain about previously-working shit being broken now.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve worked for one company that actually did it right (complete with pair programming, even). It was pretty nice.

        Too bad we were apparently the “experimental?” team and the only one in the whole company doing it that way.

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Ironically, that was the one time I was working for a large, publicly-traded company (a big-box retailer, no less – not even one of the halfway-respectable Fortune 500s!).

    • Punkie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A lot of outsourcers do this. Here’s my experience with a few companies.

      • The “team” you meet are competent, English speaking fronts. They are the demo models of the people who will work on your projects.
      • After the contract is signed, these people are swapped out with randos of varying competence.
      • In some cases, some of these randos are further hidden behind aliases: people with names that are actually more than one person sharing logins and passwords.
      • They will string you along, trying to charge maximum hours worked without regards to product or services delivered.
      • Most of these companies have a “bucket of crabs” mentality: the managers are horrible, the staff incompetent, and once the gain some skill, they leave for better companies. They backstab one another, hijack projects to fuck over coworkers, and lie and cover their tracks. Some of this is cultural, like a caste system, while some are just racist.

      At one time, these people were pretty good, but they realized they had skills and left for other countries for better pay and better working conditions. The bids got more and more competitive, cutting costs until they were literally filled with low-skilled labor who can’t be promoted or leave for economic or competence reasons.

      • Mikina@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Now that I read this, I’m kinda glad that our company doesn’t do anything like that. But it’s just a small indie team porting games to consoles, so I guess what you’re mentioning is the bigger corp problem.

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        1 year ago

        Think waterfall. But like. No design and no testing.

        Not contracting, just another small shop that offers “complete” solutions from a to z kinda situation.

        The only competent person in that org would be, oddly enough, the ceo. Everybody else just feel like they show up to be marked present on an attendance sheet in terms of being useful.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          Think waterfall. But like. No design and no testing.

          That’s just “cowboy coding.”

  • Abrslam @sh.itjust.works
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    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”.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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).

  • Ace_of_spades@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

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    1 year ago

    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.

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    Acronis Backup charges you for local data backups from one device to the other. So basically if you are using Acronis to move data from your local drive to another local device like a NAS, you pay money for every gigabyte transferred. During the time I worked for them, the script to run the transfer was literally the most simple robocopy command, even simpler than one you could write yourself. And they still do it, charge for local to local data movement. Its fucking insane. One of my clients had a $15k a month bill for local data movement. Straight up highway robbery.