• Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • AdmiralShat@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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

  • shadesdk@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • rtxn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • SSTF@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Tar_alcaran@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I quit a well known ecomm tech company a few months ago ahead of (another) one of their layoff rounds because upper mgmt was turning into ultra-wall street corpo bullshit. With 30% of staff gone, and yet our userbase almost doubling over the same period, they wanted everyone to continue increasing output and quality. We were barely keeping up with our existing workload at that point, burnout was (and still is) rampant.

    Over the two weeks after I gave my notice I discovered that in the third-party app ecosystem many thousands of apps that had (approved) access to the Billing API weren’t even operating anymore. Some had quit operating years ago, but they were still billing end-users on a monthly basis. Many end-users install dozens of apps (just like people do with mobile phones) and then forget they ever did so. The monthly rates for these apps are anywhere from 3 to 20 dollars per month, many people never checked their bank statements or invoices (when they eventually did, they’d contact support to complain about paying for an app that doesn’t even load and may not have for months or years at this point).

    I gathered evidence on at least three dozen of these zombie apps. Many of them had hundreds of active installs, and were billing users for in some cases the past three years. I extrapolated that there were probably in the high-hundreds or low-thousands of these zombie apps billing users on the platform, amounting to high-thousands to low-tens-of thousands of installs… amounting to likely millions per year in faulty and sketchy invoicing happening over our Billing API.

    Mgmt actually did put together a triage team to address my findings, but I can absolutely assure you the only reason they acted so quickly is because I was on the way out of the company. I’d spotted things like this in the wild previously and nothing had ever been done about it. The pat answer has always been well people are responsible for their own accounts and invoicing. I believe they acted on this one because I was being very vocal about how it would be ‘a shame’ if this situation ever became public, and all those end-users came after the company for those false invoices at one time. It would be a PR and Support nightmare.

    You have definitely interacted with this ecommerce platform if you shop online.

    • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      I’m unfortunately dependent upon said company, as a “partner”, which just means a hack indie developer who herds customers to the slaughter for the corp.

      The last round of layoffs was a brutal experience for the “Plus” customers. They lost crucial advisers and support, and now the guidance available is a bored and untrained chat support thrall on the other side of the world, or a stochastic parrot.

      You can smell the enshittification from here. The vendor lock-in is so intense it seemed inevitable.

      • TerkErJerbs@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        You’re absolutely right on all counts. And that’s why I quit (without waiting around to be laid off which frankly the severance package would’ve been nice). I got hired into the first (private) company I applied to, I’m thriving, and I don’t miss that stink of wall street/silicon valley money at all.

      • booty_flexx@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        ✅️ is a shopping platform

        ✅️ has an app ecosystem with a billing api

        ✅️ high probability that someone who shops online has interacted with a store on the platform

        ✅️ multiple rounds of layoffs w/ staff stretched thin

        ✅️ unclear ambitions of being a megaplatform, beyond what it already is

        I guess we’ll never know, lol

  • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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).

    • Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

  • thrawn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Flax@feddit.uk
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        6 days ago

        The largest lake in the UK by area got massively polluted and turned into a swamp of toxic green algae. It’s crazy how people just let stuff like that happen.

      • dammitBobby@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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).

  • zazilicious@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • mvlad88@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Louisoix@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • EddieTee77@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Your Huckleberry@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • deafboy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Who in the world would put a cheap blackbox in their household and give it access to the internet.

        Selfhosted CUPS bby!

        The reasonably new android phones seem to detect unix network printers now, so wireless printing works as well. Mostly… we’re talking about the printers after all.

    • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      This principle applies to many stores. If you shop at a mattress store the mattress pads are priced at triple the value.

  • LucasWaffyWaf@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • pureness@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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 ;)