Ask Lemmy

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.

Worked support for an electricity supplier. I was able to see a frightening amount of info about the customers. Even past ones who had moved elsewhere.

We also kept notes about each call, email, web or app chat. So if you were an asshole in the past, everyone will know going forward.

Also fuck landlords and landladies etc. More often than not, they were shitty to deal with.

Also we would often use Google Maps and Streetview to see what your house looked like. We also had pictures of the inside because the installation techs took pictures to confirm that works were completed as specified.

Alll of this was available to us for any reason, at any time with no oversight. And none of it was encrypted. There was also government websites in use up to 2020 that required internet explorer to use and had passwords as trivial as 'Password1'.

I left that job because the pay was lousy and the stress was pretty full on. I respected a lot of people that worked there. Both higher ups and people who came after me. But fuck was there a lot of potential for bad actors or like stalkers etc to mess with your info.

I would reccomend to everyone. Please use password managers. Especially decent open source ones like Bitwarden. Take note of every piece of info that you give a company. From your phone number, address, email etc to even when you contacted them. Also try to not have your home look like an abandoned hovel on Streetview lol. Easier said than done I know. But it may affect your dealings with support people that you need help from. And lastly, please dont use Password1 as a login. Ever. Like please.

I work in IT. Most systems have laughable security. Passwords are often saved in plain text in scripts or config files. I went to a site to help out a very large provincial governmental organization move some data out of one system and into another. They sat me down with a loaner laptop and the guy logged me into his user account on the server. When I asked for escalated privileges, he told me he'd go get someone who knew the service account passwords.

After a few minutes, I started poking around on my own... And had administrative access within an hour. I could read the database (raw data), access documents, start and stop the software, plus, figured out how to get into the upstream system that fed data to this server... I was working on figuring out the software's admin password when the guy came back. I'm sure that given some more time, I could have rooted the box because the OS hadn't been updated in years.

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.

We used to sell Windows built-in Recovery tool.

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.

Military equipment is sold to the PRC and mislabeled as COTS, i.e. civilian.

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.

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

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

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

I know this thread is old but: so many HIPPA violations, oh my God. I am a pediatric therapists/child psych, and the clinic I used to work at constantly stored client data in the most insecure ways, and therapists and staff would discuss client names, diagnosis', address, EVERYTHING openly in the break room. I complained at one point, but it went nowhere. Turns out nobody cares, lol. They also frequently ignored the best interests of our clients to maximize profit from insurance (leaning towards fraud). I ultimately left the company when my boss blatantly violated the safety of one of my clients by refusing to send her home when she had a fever of 104 F. Sure, working with kids means everyone gets sick a lot, but when the child is THAT sick, they need to be in a hospital, not in a hot, cramped room with a therapist.

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.

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.

Worked for a Gaming Hoster. Critical informations where hidden in small texts everywhere just (we) couldn't get sued. VPS would get "corrupted" when not used for a period of time, just so we could replace it with a new server. Backends were not protected. You could replace the executable with something malicious and get access to the server. Some more specific things i can't name or it would be clear which hoster it is. NEVER trust a gaming hoster which have access to you server files..

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

Snake Farm, when asked how to sell a policy that's clearly more expensive than the competition's answer was "They should feel privilege to be a Snake Farm customer."

The hubris was baffling.

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.