Software dev here. I once quoted a single line change to my manager. And the client was billed for 3 weeks. I understand that there’s a support structure involved. But 1 line to 3 weeks??!? Tech consultancy is a sham.

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.

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.

My boss was high 99% of the time he was at work.

Or awake.

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.

The potato and gravy at KFC uses whatever crud fell to the bottom of the friers each day. Usually that was good chicken bits, but sometimes it could be whatever the staff were playing catch with for fun.

Oh and be nice to the people making your food. Trust me on that one.

I worked for a domain registrar and hosting company. The margins on their products are massive!

We would charge €75 for a domain recovery, while it would just cost €2 something to actually do. And the process was fully automated.

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

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

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

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.