• esadatari@lemmy.world
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    2 years 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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    2 years 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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      2 years 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.

    • V4uban@lemmy.world
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      2 years 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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        2 years 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.

  • confluence@lemmy.world
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    2 years 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.

      • confluence@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        To them, it means if you’re depressed, schizophrenic, or otherwise incapable of controlling your emotions or perceptions, you’re being either possessed or “oppressed” by demon spirits.

  • Whitebrow@lemmy.world
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    2 years 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.

    • gjoel@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      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.

    • what@lemmy.world
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      2 years 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.

    • Punkie@lemmy.world
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      2 years 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.

    • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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      2 years 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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        2 years 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.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    2 years 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.

  • LucasWaffyWaf@lemmy.world
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    2 years 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.

  • thrawn@lemmy.world
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    2 years 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.

    • Tar_alcaran@lemmy.world
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      2 years 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.

    • pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.one
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      2 years 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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        2 years 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).

      • Flax@feddit.uk
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        6 months 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.

      • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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        2 years 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.

  • GrouchoMarxist@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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.

  • FuckOff@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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.

  • alphacyberranger@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • celerate@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.

  • Your Huckleberry@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Office Depot sells printers at very low (or even negative) margin, and then inflates the margins on cables, paper, ink, and warranty. If you want the best deal, get the printer from OD, and everything else you need somewhere else. That $20 USB cable they sell costs them $1 and you can get the same or better online for $2.68.

    • TehBamski@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I know I’m super late to the party, but everyone should know about Monoprice.com

      It’s honestly my go-to website whenever I need audio cables, video cables, PC/laptop adaptors, or even network cables. But they offer a lot more than just cables.

      Let’s say you need to buy a personal printer cable (USB-A to USB-B) at’s 6 feet long. Office Depot’s lowest price is just under $6. Best Buy’s lowest price is $7.99. Staples’ lowest cost offer is a bit over $3. Walmart’s lowest price is just under $5. Amazon’s lowest price (minus Monoprice items on the site,) is just under $7. Monoprice offers one 6 foot long printer cable for $1.99. And after adding the shipping cost for me, it came out to be $5.

  • kn33@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • Borgzilla@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      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.

  • MrBodyMassage@lemmy.world
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    2 years 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

    • Paradox@lemdro.id
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      2 years 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

    • Sharkwellington@lemmy.one
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      2 years 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.

  • JackBinimbul@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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.

  • pureness@lemmy.world
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    2 years 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 ;)