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.
cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests
I’m not an infrastructure person. If the receiving web server doesn’t log the URI, and supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS, which removes the credentials from the URI, are there security concerns?
Anyone who has access to any involved network infrastructure can trace the cleartext communication and extract the credentials.
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?
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.
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
Not to put the blame on the devs, but the problems might have been attenuated by defining a proper interface layer against the server.
It’s a damn single player game 💀
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.
What do you want? They moved it out of the environment. . .
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.
I work in air quality and it’s a similar story. It’s crazy to me seeing how much is unregulated, grandfathered in, or simply not enforced.
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.
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 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.
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).
I’ve had a few friends work for them out in Montreal, and their parent company (2 Men and a Truck). According to them it’s a mob-operated business.
Oh no! I had a great experience with 2 men and a truck when I he used them! No idea it was associated with the 1 800 junk folks
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 ;)
I worked at a 3rd party Apple retailer (they had a legacy contract from the 90s that only expired about 5-10 years ago) and they bought the cheapest RAM they could find to upgrade the Macs. They made hand over fist on RAM upgrades and still came in under what Apple charged for the same upgrade.
Isn’t the ram soldered? Is it too hard to upgrade?
if you have a hot air desoldering station it shouldn’t be too hard. but it’s a tool that most people aren’t going to have on hand.
You used to be able to just pop it out and swap. Those were the days
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.
I think we work in the same company, the dude does not smell funny to me but maybe that’s just me.
Are you that dude?
No he is many things including functioning alcoholic and a choleric but I could not detect strong odor.
I do not know what my thing is because that’s obviously my blind spot.
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.
Can confirm. I am the smelly guy. Leave me alone and you get code. Bother me and you don’t.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We need a whole branch of government dedicated to fucking with insurance companies. They basically generate free money by having money, they don’t actually provide any net positive outside of just having money
We need to move to single payer healthcare and just eliminate the need for insurance companies.
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.
Ruby Falls?
After looking it up, you can find reports from others stating the same things. When I was there as a kid, I remember that they claimed no one knew where the source of the water came from… I guess they actually know enough to help it out at least, lol
I really enjoyed it and would like to go again, but it’s no Mammoth Cave.
Gravity Falls?
Boop!
Nawh mate, Rock City is different from Ruby Falls. They also hate the guts out of Ruby Falls lol
Ah, you mean:
It hasn’t got that many signs, though! In fact, I only recall seeing the one at the entrance…
Niagara falls?
Victoria falls?
Moria Falls
~Wonder if anyone will pick up on this.~
Nawh mate, that’s up in New York and Canada.
I’m simple man not from US. I hear waterfalls, I think Niagara ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As a simple Canadian man having been to Niagra Falls several times, I defy humanity to engineer a way to pump that much water.
Probably just be easier to pay off literally everyone who goes there to lie about it.
I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word “infinity”. Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you’re a Bombast customer, you’re helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.
Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.
Why were they fired?
The bowties
Well yeah, I got that. But did they interpret that as mockery or did I miss something?
I have no idea why they were fired or who fired them - I just know that they were fired.
Bombast had a lot of helplessly incompetent (and sometimes clinically insane) executives running things, but they never lasted that long. There seemed to be some sort of Avenging Angel of Death wandering the Bombast Center and culling the more useless examples of management. My bowtie-wearing boss was one of these and certainly deserved the axe, but I don’t know if this was true of the other members of the bowtie brigade.
Worked at a globally popular fast food francise many years ago. They had collection boxes for a charity that they raised money for. None of the money went to that charity, but was divided between owners and managers.
I always say to the cashiers who are forced to ask us to donate that I will be donating directly to the charity online. Not through a multi million dollar company. When I think how a company does this for no other reason for free pr on other people’s coin, I have absolutely no guilt saying nope.
Oh, it’s more than PR. They get to donate your money and get the tax break for doing it.
I believe that is a hoax. Or at the very least misinformation. Although some areas might be different. It’s not a solid argument they are getting a tax break. PR is definitely why they do it across the board though.
Big german TV production company with succesful primetime action series used rented cars for their stunts. Different people from the team rented them with full insurance, returned them crashed. They did this until every car rent in the city stopped offering insurance without retention.
I worked for an online payment company you all know. Many eployees have access to the main DB which holds all transactions and names and everything in clear text. You could basically find out all PII (personal identification information) of any celebrity you wanted given they had anaccount. Address, phone number, credit card and all. If you knew a bit of SQL you could basically find whoever person you wanted and get purchase history and all.
Cant say I didnt use this to find stuff about my exes or various celebrities.