A national (not US) cake company uses expired ingredients because it’s cheaper. Yes, I did report them to the authorities.
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
This local single location grocery store by my house would unwrap and rewrap meat packages when it hit expiration dates in order to generate a new label with a new expiration date. If the meat looked bad, it would be added to the meat grinder to make ground beef.
Not to be that person buuut…you should really report this. Someone could die.
Many years ago there was a local grocery store nearby that got caught doing this for years. And not cleaning the butcher’s table basically ever.
An AI company… They used to manually change system event logs to show it wasn’t their software that caused the downtime for our clients.
Bought over a million dollars worth hardware (25% of which didn’t even got racked), over 200 46inch LED screens that no one used, and very expensive offices at posh locations in the bid to increase its IPO valuation.
I’ve always been wondering to what degree are logs accurate, or rather believable as presented.
Such as when it comes to affiliate marketing, or ads. How can I, as a customer, know the numbers Amazon or Google about how many people used my link / seen my ad, aren’t full of shit?
Well related to that Google has recently been accused of faking that data sooo https://qz.com/google-video-ads-violate-its-own-standards-1850585533
Its been a decade since ive done cpa marketing but we used invisible tracking pixels to cross reference how many ads have been viewed and click through rates but ya they can wash the ads with junk traffic.
I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word “infinity”. Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you’re a Bombast customer, you’re helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.
Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.
Once I realized this I turned it off on my modem/router. I turned the router function off completely to be able to use my own equipment rather than the crap they give you.
Why were they fired?
The bowties
Well yeah, I got that. But did they interpret that as mockery or did I miss something?
I have no idea why they were fired or who fired them - I just know that they were fired.
Bombast had a lot of helplessly incompetent (and sometimes clinically insane) executives running things, but they never lasted that long. There seemed to be some sort of Avenging Angel of Death wandering the Bombast Center and culling the more useless examples of management. My bowtie-wearing boss was one of these and certainly deserved the axe, but I don’t know if this was true of the other members of the bowtie brigade.
The shared internet thing is a setting that comes turned on for Xfinity routers by default (aka the ones you rent from them). If you go into the settings of the router you can turn the wifi sharing setting off.
At Disneyland, Mickey Mouse is always played by a woman, due to the small costume. So if you put your arm around him for a photo, try not to accidentally touch Mickey’s boobs.
I think, from the people reading this…they will definitely do the exact opposite.
The succinct matter of fact way you impart on the text leads me to think this is a kind of personal public faux pas
I worked at an ISP. The DHCP server we use for our DSL offering was made in the 90s and hasn’t been updated since.
Frankly, I don’t see this a a problem as long as the software is up to date and the hardware is sound. I bet there are thousands of SPARC servers out there processing data 24/7 since 1995.
Might want to get on updating it soon for IPV6 though
I don’t know, I remember hearing that everything would soon be IPV6 a couple decades ago.
The alternative to IPv6 is CGNAT.
CGNAT is really annoying for users, since the entire ISP looks like a single IP address. This can lead to situations where the entire ISP accidentally gets classified as a bot or otherwise blocked. It’s not too hard to find these kinds of stories from StarLink customers.
We are at the point where we are are legitimately out of IPv4 addresses. Household NAT isn’t enough and CGNAT has too many problems. IPv6 code was written ages ago and is very stable in all OSs these days.
It really is just these legacy middle boxes holding us back.
I’ve worked for a few of the larger ISPs in the US. They all have their own special weird shit like a windows NT machine shoved in a corner in a CO in west Texas that you have to remote desktop into and run some java applet from the 90 to log into a hardwired machine from the 70s just to set up a voicemail box for a phone line. Ain’t broke don’t fix it leads to some wild setups at companies you wouldn’t expect it from.
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.
This doesn’t surprise me at all, not even a little. You’re a multi million or billion dollar company and you’re asking me to provide charity that you can use as a tax break? Even if they were using it for charity it’s still a way to subsidize bottom line with customer money and “look” altruistic in the process.
Some places don’t get a tax break but the free PR is very real.donate direct. Never through a company.
They don’t get to use it as a tax break, you do. If they are doing fraud then that’s something else and they should be punished.
This is correct, there’s no tax break. They do it they can state “so and so corp donated 1.5 million Megabucks last year”. It’s all bullshit.
I always say to the cashiers who are forced to ask us to donate that I will be donating directly to the charity online. Not through a multi million dollar company. When I think how a company does this for no other reason for free pr on other people’s coin, I have absolutely no guilt saying nope.
Oh, it’s more than PR. They get to donate your money and get the tax break for doing it.
I believe that is a hoax. Or at the very least misinformation. Although some areas might be different. It’s not a solid argument they are getting a tax break. PR is definitely why they do it across the board though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
Isn’t the ram soldered? Is it too hard to upgrade?
if you have a hot air desoldering station it shouldn’t be too hard. but it’s a tool that most people aren’t going to have on hand.
You used to be able to just pop it out and swap. Those were the days
I worked at a 3rd party Apple retailer (they had a legacy contract from the 90s that only expired about 5-10 years ago) and they bought the cheapest RAM they could find to upgrade the Macs. They made hand over fist on RAM upgrades and still came in under what Apple charged for the same upgrade.
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.
eh DHCP isn’t really important right? obviously if it hasn’t changed since the 80’s why would you need to reboot your server.
what are vulnerabilities?
I’ve worked in IT consulting for over 10 years and have never once lied about the capabilities of a product. I have said, it doesn’t do that natively, but if that’s a requirement we can scope how much it would take to make it happen. Sadly my company is very much the exception.
The worst I saw was years ago I was working on an infrastructure upgrade of a Hyper-V environment. The client purchased a backup solution I wasn’t familiar with but said it supported Hyper-V. It turns out their Hyper-V support was in “beta”. It wasn’t in beta. They were literally using this client as a development environment. It was a freaking joke. At one point I had to get on the phone with one of their developers and explain how high-availability and fail-over worked.
I could very well have been that developer. Usual story, sales promised the world, that our vmware-based system would run on anything and everything, and of course it’s all HA and load balanced, smash cut to me on Monday morning trying to figure out how to make it do that before it goes live on Wednesday.
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 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.
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”.
Oh, so like ambulances in the USA.
“The ambulance had issues making it unsafe (or even illegal) to drive? But it can still drive down the road? Doesn’t seem too bad: keep an eye on it.”
You’d think they’d have money to keep it pristine, with how much a short ambulance ride costs in the USA
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.
This one doesn’t surprise me. I remember a recording of a guy in India doing a job interview over the phone. He had a friend on a other phone giving him the answers to the test questions. The person giving the interview heard enough in the background to figure this out, and gave the cheater tips on how to be less obvious next time.
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.
Journalism died decades ago.
