• rtxn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • V4uban@lemmy.world
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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.

    • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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

    • Gearheart@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I want to believe… but the morph has always been exactly.

      “nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.”

      But I want to believe…

      Edit: looking back at previous shittymorph posts. Grammar, punctuation and delivery is at much higher standard… I’m sad 😢. I’m hoping that I’m way way wrong. Can anyone reach out to shittymorph on reddit to confirm?

      • shittymorph@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That is quite an astute observation, in fact many folks would have overlooked such precise details. As you could imagine, with newness and changing situation such as a major platform shift, and as we enter a revolutionary technological time period in hopes of a prosperous fediverse, it’s easy for us to become a overzealous and infatuated with all the excitement, but we must remember, it pales in comparison to the crowd’s excitement in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.

            • ThtCrzyBstrd@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Back on the site-that-must-not-be-named, u/shittymorph would occasionally come out of nowhere with the one story about Hell in a Cell. It was his thing. Shortly before the place went to absolute hell, he posted saying he was stepping away for personal reasons.

              We believe this is an imposter.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You son of a bitch, I don’t know if you’re the og shittymorph, but I missed that bastard.

  • 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.

  • 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

    • SweetBilliam@midwest.social
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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.

    • wildebeesties@lemmy.world
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      9 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.

    • Sharkwellington@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • 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).

    • Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      I’ve had a few friends work for them out in Montreal, and their parent company (2 Men and a Truck). According to them it’s a mob-operated business.

      • Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Oh no! I had a great experience with 2 men and a truck when I he used them! No idea it was associated with the 1 800 junk folks

  • thrawn@lemmy.world
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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.

    • pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Some places are insanely polluted to the point where you wonder how a whole company could be so braindead and essentially poison themselves.
      A place not far from where I live had a chemical plant which just dumped loads of chemicals on a meadow for years. Now there are ground water pumps installed there which need to run 24/7 so that the chemicals don’t contaminate nearby rivers and hence the rest of the country.
      When taking samples from the pumped up water you can smell gasoline.

      • dammitBobby@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        We’re house shopping and there has been a house on a lake sitting on the market forever. I got curious and researched the lake and… It’s a literal superfund site. The company that was on the other side of the lake just dumped their waste chemicals right on the shore and it has polluted both the lake and ground water forever essentially because they don’t break down. I looked up the previous owner… Died of cancer. The shit that companies are and were allowed to get away with is just insane. Meanwhile right wing nut jobs want to get rid of the EPA (which was ironically created by Richard Nixon).

      • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        A place not far from where I live had a chemical plant which just dumped loads of chemicals on a meadow for years.

        Sounds cheap.

      • Flax@feddit.uk
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        1 month ago

        The largest lake in the UK by area got massively polluted and turned into a swamp of toxic green algae. It’s crazy how people just let stuff like that happen.

    • Tar_alcaran@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s just as depressing when something counts as “clean”. My saddest example was a former sand pit, they spent 30 years digging out 15 meters of sand, then another 30 years filling it with anything from industrial to veterinary waste, “capped” it with rubble in the late 40s and called it clean enough.

      Had a bigass job digging out the top 3 meters of random waste, including several thousand of barrels of whatever the fuck. And definitely no unexploded ordnance (spoiler, after finding several ww2 rifle stocks and helmets, the first mortarshells were dug up too). After makimg room, it was covered in sand, clay, bentonite and a protective grid.

      So naturally, 3 months after that finished, some cockhead decided to throw an anchor and hit go all ahead flank on his assholes boat and tore the whole thing up. No need to fix anything though, just shovel some more sand it, that’ll stop the anthrax!

      This was all in open connection with a major river, of course. One people swim in.

  • 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 ;)

    • Another Person @lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • 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.

    • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      I’m unfortunately dependent upon said company, as a “partner”, which just means a hack indie developer who herds customers to the slaughter for the corp.

      The last round of layoffs was a brutal experience for the “Plus” customers. They lost crucial advisers and support, and now the guidance available is a bored and untrained chat support thrall on the other side of the world, or a stochastic parrot.

      You can smell the enshittification from here. The vendor lock-in is so intense it seemed inevitable.

      • TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        You’re absolutely right on all counts. And that’s why I quit (without waiting around to be laid off which frankly the severance package would’ve been nice). I got hired into the first (private) company I applied to, I’m thriving, and I don’t miss that stink of wall street/silicon valley money at all.

      • booty_flexx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        ✅️ is a shopping platform

        ✅️ has an app ecosystem with a billing api

        ✅️ high probability that someone who shops online has interacted with a store on the platform

        ✅️ multiple rounds of layoffs w/ staff stretched thin

        ✅️ unclear ambitions of being a megaplatform, beyond what it already is

        I guess we’ll never know, lol

  • Abrslam @sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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”.

    • oatscoop@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      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.”

  • LucasWaffyWaf@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Anybody knows that one waterfall attraction in the Southeast US? The one that advertises bloody everywhere? Waterfall is pumped during the dry seasons, otherwise there’d be nothing to see. Lots of the formations are fake, and the Cactus and Candle formation was either moved from a different spot in the cave, or is from a different cave in New Mexico. Management doesn’t want people to know that, but fuck 'em.

  • Jakdracula@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Yes, in the mid 1990s, large banks in the USA were being electronically compromised so often that they wouldn’t investigate or pursue a loss if it was under $50k.

  • Teppichbrand@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Big german TV production company with succesful primetime action series used rented cars for their stunts. Different people from the team rented them with full insurance, returned them crashed. They did this until every car rent in the city stopped offering insurance without retention.