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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like you escaped a violent theocratic cult.
No, cults are small religions, this is a big religion
I feel like there are minimum two definitions of cult, that being a high controll group like say jones town and to a lesser but still damaging extent seventh day adventists for example and just a smaller religious grouping.
This place would 100% meet the BITE standard of cult classification.
The BITE classification was invented in order to justify hatred of small religions, by taking a word that already had a meaning (cult) and attaching a second, pejorative meaning to it. It’s like if I write a fantasy novel with a species of evil creatures called jews. Jew is already a word, and it’s a horrific act of religious persecution to take a pre-existing word for marginalised religions and spin it into an unrelated negative.
If some of the pastors there had their way, that’s exactly what power would control this country.
Mental illness is supernatural? What does that mean?
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.
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.
Thai is basically my current team, haha.
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.
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.
I worked for a company like that. Wall Street shits bought us up and sold everything that wasn’t bolted down.
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.
Can confirm. I am the smelly guy. Leave me alone and you get code. Bother me and you don’t.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.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).
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
There is a million times more counterfeit/fake items at amazon than you think, and they dont care one bit to fix the problem
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Promising features that never existed is part and parcel to a lot of software sales, whether gov or private. Speaking from post-sales experience.
I think it’s fine to promise them, but to claim they currently exist when you never plan to implement them is what I couldn’t support.
The contractor I worked for was run by a man who used to say “if the contract says they’ll blow up the contractor on delivery, we’re putting in a bid and solve the problem later”
I worked in government contracting (and government, for that matter) for years and that blows my mind. I can’t remember the details, but if you even had a bad reviews, much less being found noncompliant, it could disqualify you entirely from some contract vehicles for a matter of years. Wild that there’s some agency that somehow lets people get away with fraud.
Also, if that cost the government money, there’s a chance you could report that after the fact and make some money.
Might be local government. Me and sales have this argument pretty often
Me: it is in the spec
Sales: no one noticed it except you
Me: thanks?
Sales: no one is going to care
Me: then take it out of the spec and resign everything.
Sales: why are you making a big deal about this?
Me: because it is in the spec that we signed and if we don’t honor the spec they can backcharge us.
Sales: that won’t happen
Me: you are right because we are going to follow the spec. If you don’t want me to please email me, the department head, and the client specifically ordering me not to follow the contract that we signed.
Yeah I’m in Europe and our customers were municipalities buying healthcare related solutions. It happened after our little startup got taken over by a big player and they started getting involved in the contract bids.
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?
Why is everyone here afraid to name the companies?
Unless you’re sharing something that only you would know and the company is aware that you’re the only one who knows it, there’s no way they can identify you.
Something tells me the people posting here who had “NDAs” didn’t actually have any sort of a high level clearance to important information.
It’s a bold assumption that you will never dox yourself or be doxed. The fediverse by nature not at all private.
Yup. I was able to identify the employee running my company’s subreddit that was hosting a current/former employee hatefest and many, many leaks, fueling RTO protests and unionization. Took all of about 30 mins of digging through his comments to figure it out. I never acted on it because I support everything about what it would lead to, but if I could figure it out, so could someone smarter than me who works for the interests of my company. He was still at the company, last I checked about six months ago.
Yeah I’m just gonna have to take my old reddit strategy of rolling a new account once a month.
So… avoiding mentioning the company name will help an individual if they’re doxed while talking about it?
Do you really believe this?
If an account posts enough vague info, eventually when you piece them all together they’re not so vague anymore.
That’s not even close to that I said.
If you say a bunch of things that would get you in trouble on your anonymous account, then over a period of time say enough other things to dox yourself, all your old account content is still there. Over time a little slip here, a little slip there. You put enough pins on the board, someone can find you, hell you might even accidentally talk about something unique. Happens all the time.
It’s a risk for no good reason. Your’re taking the risk so that some other nameless person on a social media instance can go ohhhhhh that company did bad things.
People are scared to death to talk about their company publicly because we are trained to have that fear.
It’s pretty wild how ingrained it can be and how much power it gives the company to do whatever they want with no fear of consequences.
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
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?
Confirmed imposter. Sorry everyone. 😢
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.
😢 I don’t know what to feel anymore.
What the fuck are you 2 talking about?
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.
You son of a bitch, I don’t know if you’re the og shittymorph, but I missed that bastard.
I can die happy now, having seen this on the fediverse. Amazing.
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.
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.
I appreciate the exact price of $2.68.
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 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.
Decades ago? This has always been the case. It was the case 50 years ago. Still is now.
