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.
As weird as it may seem, this might be a good argument in favor of Pascal. I despised learning it at uni, as it seems worthless, but is seems that it can still handle business-critical software for 20 years.
What OP didn’t tell you is that, due to its age, it’s running on an unpatched WinXP SP2 install and patching, upgrading to SP3, or to any newer Windows OS will break the software calls that version of Pascal relies upon.
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.
I could very well have been that developer. Usual story, sales promised the world, that our vmware-based system would run on anything and everything, and of course it’s all HA and load balanced, smash cut to me on Monday morning trying to figure out how to make it do that before it goes live on Wednesday.
I worked as a pastor and professor for a global, evangelical television ministry/college. They knowingly conceal scholarship on the Bible and punish their pastors for asking any questions that undermine their most closely held traditions (including anti-evolution, mental illness is supernatural, etc.). They tell their US viewers that they can’t call themselves Christians if they don’t vote Republican, while still enjoying tax-exempt status. They use pseudohistorians to inspire Christian Nationalism over their network, and are one of the largest propaganda networks for the Religious Right. A U.S. Capitol police commander told me his men were fighting people who were wearing the network’s brand.
Sounds like you escaped a violent theocratic cult.
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.
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.
I worked for a company like that. Wall Street shits bought us up and sold everything that wasn’t bolted down.
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.
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
Over a decade ago I worked as a freelancer for an Investment Bank (the largest one that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash, which was a few years later) were the head of the Proprietary Trading Desk (the team of Traders who invest for the profit of the bank) asked me if I could change the software so that they could see the investments of the Client Trading Desk (who invest for clients with client money) was making, with the assent of the latter team.
Now if the guys investing money for the bank know what they guys investing customer money are doing they can do things like Front-Run the customer trades (or serve them at exactly the right price to barelly beat the competiotion) thus making more profits for the bank and hence get bigger bonuses. This is why Financial regulations say that there is supposed to be so-called Chinese Walls between the proprietary trading and the customer trading activities: they’re supposed to be segregated and not visible to each other.
Note that the heads of both teams were mates and already regularly had chats, so they might already have been exchanging this info informally.
I was quite fresh in there (less than 1 year) and the software system I worked in at the time was used by both teams, but when I started looking into it I saw that the separation was very explicitly coded in software and that got me thinking about what I had learned from the mandatory compliance training I had done when I first joined (so, yeah, that stuff is not totally useless!!!)
So I asked for written confirmation from the heads of both teams, and just got some vague response e-mails, no clear “do such and such”.
So I played the fool and took it to a seperate team called Compliance (responsible for compliance with financial regulations) saying I just wanted to make sure it was all prim and proper, “just in case”.
Of course, it kinda blew up (locally) and I ended up called to a meeting with the heads of the Prop Desk and whatnot - all stern looks and barelly contained angry tones - were I kept playing the fool.
Ultimatelly it ended up not being a problem for me at all, to the point that after that bank went bust and its component parts were sold to another bank, the technical team manager asked me to come back to work with the same IT group (remember, I was a freelancer) with even greater responsabilities, so this didn’t exactly damage my career.
That said, over the years there were various cases of IT guys in large investment banks who went along with “innocent” requests from the Traders and ended up as the fall-guys for subsequent breaking of Finance Regulations, serving jail time, so had I gone along with that request I would’ve actually risked ending up in jail.
(Financial Regulators were and are a complete total joke when it comes to large banks, which actually makes it more likely that some poor techie guy will be made the fall guy to protected the bank and its heads).
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?
Confirmed imposter. Sorry everyone. 😢
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.
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 worked for for the railroad. Nothing is fixed ever. I witnessed hundreds of code violations every day for years. Doesn’t matter if a rail car or locomotive meets code as long as it “can travel” its good to go.
When an employee inspector finds a defective rail car management determines if it will get fixed. If the supervisor “feels” like “it’s not that bad” then the rail car is “let go”.
This local single location grocery store by my house would unwrap and rewrap meat packages when it hit expiration dates in order to generate a new label with a new expiration date. If the meat looked bad, it would be added to the meat grinder to make ground beef.
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.
People are scared to death to talk about their company publicly because we are trained to have that fear.
It’s pretty wild how ingrained it can be and how much power it gives the company to do whatever they want with no fear of consequences.
It’s a bold assumption that you will never dox yourself or be doxed. The fediverse by nature not at all private.
Back when I managed a Blockbuster Video, most stores ran at a loss thanks to theft.
The real reason most stores failed wasn’t because DVDs were going out. It was because we couldn’t stem the flow of money out the door thanks to thieves.
Worked at a newspaper for a few years.
With very few exceptions, they do not give a fuck about you or the news. The advertisers are their customers and your attention is their product.
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 used to work at Starbucks (almost a decade ago now), but at the time, the motto was “just say yes” to any customer requests. We also had free drink cards that you could give out to deesclate any issue. So I would say any time you’re even the slightest bit unhappy, bring it up, and you should at least have your problem solved, if not compensated for a free drink next time.
We also had customer satisfaction surveys that would print on reciepts, where filling one out would get the customer a free drink. We always kept them for customers that were happier to try and rig the odds in our favour of a higher rating, but also if a customer asked for one, I would give it if I had it. You could always ask the cashier if they have any of those as well.
Again, not sure how much either of those things have changed in the past 10 years, and I’m not sure how regional it was (this was in Canada at a corporately run store), but maybe worth a try.
Also I love these types of threads – great topic to post.
