Ask Lemmy

I worked as software engineer and my boss tolerated me going to office at 2pm and leave at 9pm. It's against company policy, certainly, but no one talked about it. It still is my most productive and happy time.

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.

Just remembered another one:

Have you ever had an anonymous survey sent to you by your work or by a company your work has hired? They're not anonymous. Management knows what your opinions are and will use them against you.

I worked for a consultant that would try and help fix businesses. The worst example I can think of was when I saw one person had answered a survey question saying that their employer had a "blame culture". Rather than trying to work on the processes or address why something had gone wrong, staff would start pointing fingers to keep out of trouble. This didn't fix anything and only made people spend all the time covering their posteriors.

The manager called a general meeting of everyone at that site and then singled out the employee who'd mentioned the blame culture, blaming him for saying there was a blame culture. The employee then pointed out that they'd been told, in writing, that the survey was anonymous. That employee called the manager a liar and then she lost control of the meeting, with lots of employees calling her a liar and several storming out. They weren't in business the next year.

The majority of tech startups are super chaotic and barely keeping things running. More than you would ever imagine.

I worked for a pretty popular magazine back in the late 90's. One day near the beginning/middle of 2000, we were all called down to the bullpen for a last minute meeting by management and marketing. (That's never a good sign.)

We were told that we have a great product with amazing writing, but marketing doesn't know how to sell it so they're closing us down. Instead, we went online only. I was the web developer so I survived the firings.

So then we figured that we were set because our website produced more content and had more traffic than any of the company's other websites. However, in March of 2001, we had another emergency meeting. Again, we were told our content was great, but the company was going in another direction. Instead of producing our own content, the company was going to just repost other sites' content. I and everyone else in my team were let go.

Needless to say, the whole "we'll just repost what other people posted" plan didn't go so well. Last time I checked, the company wasn't doing very well at all.

Not strictly a company secret, but I had to sign an NDA for it, because... reasons.

I used to work for a massive conglomerate, these guys are making from components for satellites and tank to rubber gloves for hospitals, and everything in between. My job was to help the company implement regulations, work with auditors and generally follow product specific rules.

So I was on these 2 New Product Development teams and because the products needed some very specific testing equipment, we started working with local authorities and some contractors to build the testing station in the future factory. We drafted plans, prepare documents, we had an auditor come and see the place, the contractor came and checked what he needed to do, everything was going according to plan.

While all of this was happening, I was on a separate project where we were working on closing down the above mentioned factory.

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.

Worked in tech support for a major internet provider. We would constantly have major ouages in various locations due to overtaxed systems going down. Corporate refused to allow us to admit that there were problems on our end and forced the techs to troubleshoot the customer calls, even though we all knew that we could do nothing for the customer. Saw multiple techs releived of their job for telling the truth to the customers. So many hours wasted on both the customer and techs part.

That I made their DropBox account, and they can't access it anymore..

One company I worked at had more full-time collections people than sales people. Our products were a lot cheaper than our competitors, and it attracted a lot of customers with no money.

Another company I worked at ignored all "first notice" bills they ran up. CFO told me that if a company wanted paid, they needed to send a second notice.

I worked for lumber liquidators, and their point of sale software seemed to be surplus navy because if you dug deep enough you could order nuclear sub parts.

My wife worked at a pretty well-known hiking supplies store in our country. The retail price is sometimes over x4 the manufacturing cost and extremely marked up. The amount of faulty products with manufacturing faults is really high, with the suppliers 100% aware but gave the stores discounts on the wholesale price just to push units, even though the clothes/bags/shoes would break after a year or so of light use.

I work for a MSP that works a lot with very large tech companies. Most of these companies outsource a lot of work to India. I frequently have to remote in and help them with our product. You'll see passwords in plain text being thrown around in teams chats, .txt documents on the desktop and emails like candy. I will frequently work with individuals with titles like "Cloud Engineer" to "Solutions Expert" that I swear have never opened a terminal window in their life and unable to follow basic IT instructions. I have worked with a lot of very good Indian engineers, but I swear chronyism has a lot of people put into positions that they aren't really qualified for.

When I worked at Bob Evans I watched a manager peel the expiration dates off of expired food and replace them with dates in the future to avoid waste.

I used to work at a hotel and they never changed the duvet covers guest to guest, only the other sheets.

I don't have any interesting secrets or facts from my current ex-jobs, so I'll share an interesting fact from a buddy's. It's one of those companies that offers automated phone systems (and chats, nowadays) that listen to your options rather than taking number inputs.

This may no longer be the case, but these systems were not actually automated. There are entire call centers dedicated to these phone systems, whereby an operator listens to your call snippet and manually selects the next option in the phone tree, or transcribes your input.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if advances in AI have made this whole song and dance less in need of human intervention, but once upon a time, your call wasn't truly automated - it was federated.

The dealership I worked for gave out loans they knew people couldn’t afford, ignored safety items, slapped inspection stickers that didn’t match vehicles to get them on the lot. Ran a lift that was jerry rigged because the wiring busted along with the hydraulic tank.

Employee bought a vehicle and his manager watched where he went on his lunch (via GPS installed by said company into sold vehicles). Funnily enough it was to an interview.

Oh another one. School bus company 1 is one of the largest in the US. In between runs a buddies transmission starts leaking on his bus. He calls the terminal on my phone to let them know.

“Keep driving keep it going, we are not sending out another bus to you.”

Transmission in a 45ft flat nose busts fully in the middle of one of the busiest intersections in the town. He calls over radio letting them know it busted as he told them.

“What do you mean this is first time I’m hearing about this”

Flat nose I drove kept writing up for not having heat and turning it into the people I was told. This went for an entire winter and I didn’t have heat until after the thaw and spring started. Mechanic never knew that bus had been being written up. They were hiding slips. Same bus, folding door let go and was flapping in the wind with a bus full of students. Over the radio they said to keep driving and refused to send a replacement.

A friend of mine was a manager at a fairly upscale women's clothing store.

She said that even at 95% discounts, they could turn a profit.

I worked for a company that had an expensive San Jose lease during the .com bubble. When they decided they needed to get out of that lease, they folded the company - “fired” everyone, then re-hired everyone under an independent second company that was owned by the parent company. Sketchy, but not really surprising…

When they re-hired me, they didn’t have me sign any NDAs. All the old NDAs were with the company that folded, not the parent company. Some days I wish I had been unethical enough to sell off their source code to a competitor.

A large pizza chain, it costs about $1 to make a large cheese pizza. Cheese is re-used as much as possible.