Ask Lemmy

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.

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

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

I find it humorous that y’all think it’s only the company you worked at that had a fragile tech solution held together (sometimes literally) with duct tape and coat hangers, as part of a mission critical business process.

Pretty much every company big or tiny has at least one permanent “temporary” solution in place.

The buildings alarm code was 0711. Guess where I worked....

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 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! 🙃 )

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 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.

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.

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

Or awake.

We used to sell Windows built-in Recovery tool.

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.

Anybody knows that one waterfall attraction in the Southeast US? The one that advertises bloody everywhere? Waterfall is pumped during the dry seasons, otherwise there'd be nothing to see. Lots of the formations are fake, and the Cactus and Candle formation was either moved from a different spot in the cave, or is from a different cave in New Mexico. Management doesn't want people to know that, but fuck 'em.

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.