• shadesdk@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • 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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      2 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.

      • 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

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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

    • 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).

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • ???@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    Every time we notified anyone about a potential illegal breach of gdpr that could get us fined or sued, admin pretended they had never been informed because the changes would take too long and collide with their plans to “revamp everything, reinvent the platform, and rebrand”.

    I should have whistleblown them myself if it were not for the fact that doing so would probably get some previous employees fired rather than hurt the company.

  • 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?

  • Louisoix@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    A certain fruit company knows about you WAY more than you can imagine, and most of the information is accessible to even the lowest ranks of support. And yeah, my NDA is finally over.

  • netvor@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The building, used by several hundred employees, had a security systems with 4-digit codes. I’ve been part of group of people who liked to work late times, and the building would lock at midnight – the box by the door would start beeping and you would need to unlock it within a minute or so, or “proper alarm” would ensue.

    However, to unlock the alarm you did not need your card – all you needed to do was to enter any valid code. Guess what was the chance that, say, 1234 was someone’s valid code? Yes.

    We’ve been all using some poor guy’s code 1234, and after several years, when he left the company we just guessed some other obvious code (4321) and kept using that.

    By the way, after entering the code to the box by the door, it would shortly display name of the person whom the code “belonged” to. One of our colleagues took it as a personal secret project to slowly go through all 10000 possible codes and collect the names of the people, just for the kick of it.

    (By the way, I don’t work for that company anymore, and more importantly, the company does not use that building anymore, so don’t get any ideas! 🙃 )

    • Lurkinglemmy@lemmynsfw.com
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      1 year ago

      One of our colleagues took it as a personal secret project to slowly go through all 1000 possible codes and collect the names of the people, just for the kick of it.

      Just an FYI it’s 10,000 codes, not 1,000. 0000-9999