People who work for massive corporations, what is a 'secret' that the company tries to hide, but is actually common knowledge among the employees?

I had a pot dealer back in the day who would do the same thing with his grams. We called them his 'sweetheart' grams. They would be 1.2 or 1.3, then after a while it .9 or .8. He couldn't go lower than that, but he would try to make sure there was a decent hunk of stem in there to make it look fuller lol.

I fucken knew it. I was like why did the pieces shrink???

I learned the recipe for Cane's sauce and just do it at home now. The chicken was always mid, the sauce was the key. Now I use that sauce on everything, and I make goooood tendies.

So if I maybe needed a credit card for the first time in my life(FML re: my targeted ads for the next 6m) what should I do specifically do?

Then dont pay again for 7 years !! Ha

What’s the difference between a small, a medium and a large company? The amount of unread SOPs.

I work in advertising, so have worked with clients from massive to small-ish. It was eye opening seeing how dysfunctional major brands are. Like… shocking the level of waste, miscommunication, and just general BS. I hate when people talk about how the government should operate like a business, cause from my experience most businesses are poorly run. And obviously that’s not the point of government, but point is businesses shouldn’t be put on a pedestal the way they often are.

Yup. Small business often don’t have any oversight and then large companies have too many moving parts and so their oversight suffers too. I just saw a news article that someone who worked for Los Angeles Unified School District was able to embezzle **$23 Million Dollars** ! A large school district, yet somehow this was able to fly under the radar. 🤷‍♀️

Yeah, I had a company owner argue with me that he definitely did *not* have (and was *not* going to pay for) enough storage to keep emails basically forever. Took me a second to realize this wasn't about storage space.

This is actually really interesting. I just assumed outlook was incapable of finding old emails in searches because it can't find the new ones either lol

A lesson that every corporation’s General Counsel learned (or should have) from _United States v. Microsoft_.

Wow. Would be super illegal in Germany.

What?!?! You guys have auto delete?!?! It's a terrible terrible idea. Yeah you protect from regulators and discovery but also you don't have ANY way to defend the company or yourself or anyone, hell sometimes some clients take more than a month to answer me, super long lead times when you work in finance. I understand that it is to erase your paper trail but.... you don't have a paper trail for yourself. I sometimes forget what I told you 3 days ago, and you want me to remember what we discussed 6 months ago??? In my company it is policy not to erase emails only the phishing or similar and ONLY AFTER you reported the email to IT. Some people even have a folder called Trash just to give yourself peace of mind if you want to "erase" an email but it stays there forever.

This is pretty much the most terrifying thing happening in society that almost no one is talking about

Not just reading & writing, but knowing what a credible source is, and how to identify one.

Previous middle school teacher here: I had many 7th grade students who couldn’t do basic math, read a clock, and were on a third grade reading level. Myself and their other teachers all recommended them repeating the grade but the district said no because “they’ll make it up next year” … that is the bs excuse they use to not have to say “we don’t want to pay for them an additional year”. It was incredibly upsetting. I’m sure they went to high school barely on a 5th grade reading level…

I’m seeing this first hand at my son’s school. My son has a fine motor skills deficiency (he has weak fingers due an inherited condition). He can write, but needs practice and help.  This ‘help’ is covered by an IEP. In a meeting with the principal, I was told that they would no longer be focusing on helping him write, but focus on allowing him to record his answers and practice typing.  While this sounds reasonable, it is absolutely NOT an answer. He has the ability to write, but needs to strengthen his hands/fingers. This CAN be done, but the school doesn’t care.  My husband and I have hired OT therapists and specialists to help him outside of school hours.  If we didn’t have money or time, we would be screwed. He would never learn how to write (and it sounds like typing is even in the back-burner). Likewise, I have three friends who have kids who have problem reading (like at all), and they are still getting passed through grades.  We are creating systemic failure in two critical areas needed for communication. No wonder we are becoming a depressed and isolated society. 

It's back to how they changed how reading should be handled. Think it was Lucy caulkin's stuff, might be wrong. Problem is now that many parents don't read to their kids or even do basic math problems with them. So now when we get kids in high school with no skills, what do you do? They're out at 18 by either graduating or dropping out to get a job. At least by helping them graduate they have a piece of paper that says they're somewhat competent Edit: also SAT average scores have been going down since 1975. They want us to be dumb. If you have to ask who the "they" is, it's billionaires and other "elites". 

It already has had devastating consequences. Just look around at the state of the nation and think about how much of this could have been avoided with a more educated populace.

But, ChatGPT will save them? - signed a professor who doesn’t believe everyone belongs in college.

To my understanding, is this not true of nearly all software? Haha Microsoft literally just broke Teams meeting invites *today* due to a minor, unrelated update elsewhere. Lol

No, no, this is just a *temporary* workaround until we have the time and resources to do it properly *4 years and 6 re-orgs later...* Why the hell did they do it like this?

Oh, you guys added Hope to your stack? We don't do that. Does it help?

Same! And we work in a highly regulated industry with a lot of PII and the code is.. wide open. Every time there's a breach we say it was a "one-off", fire an innocent exec as the scapegoat, and carry on. It is well-known internally but to speak it out loud ensures you are the next scapegoat...

This is the same for smaller corporations too. Most jobs to be honest. I'm aware of more than one person who got hired because they already knew someone. The job was posted publicly because it was a legal requirement. There was no intention of hiring anyone who applied tho, they already knew who was getting hired. It's one of those catch-22's -- intentions are good (anyone can apply) but it ends up making things worse a lot of the time (you waste time preparing / prepping...)

That way they can also pay the internal candidate less money than any external candidate would accept, because it’s a “raise” from what they were making in their previous role. Source: me, I’ve experienced it firsthand, twice.

I worked for a company with 250k employees. They much preferred external candidates because it didn't leave them with another position to backfill.

Might be the best definition of corporate ive ever heard.

I got caught up in this last year. Had a manager I loved and stuck around through some shitty projects because he had my back better than anywhere I've worked before. 8 years. Started working on a shiny new project/acquisition as a technical lead for stretch assignment last year. Turns out the project in question is actually a battle ground between three different divisions (B, C, and D) and five different VPs. 3 months in, there's a reorg announcement. My director is gone & the team is shifting to a "global" reporting structure under a different division. They want to s*** my manager into another manager role in Division "B" with much less upward mobility & take away half his team (that he built from the ground up) to boot. They'd move him onto a project that division screwed the pooch on and basically leave him playing cleanup on a multiple year failure. But my manager still had the choice to move to the global division instead (with the majority of the team he built)& took it and has since gotten his long overdue promotion to director there. My manager had me tapped to be the group manager when he moved up & fought like hell to keep me in his reporting structure (I was BCC'ed on the emails and there were a few live meetings I wasn't present for). But because I was working a key role on the shiny new money making project, the people in charge of Division "B" insisted I get pulled over to their side. Lame. Now I report to someone who has too many direct reports & none of them do what I do so he's not even sure what my job is and said as much at my yearly review where I was given a "satisfactory" rating. Whatever. But the really fun part is that the people who were in charge of staffing up the project were from Division "C". They were happy to bring me on when I was in a neutral division but were beyond pissed when they found out I was in Division "B". Like calling me into a meeting to clarify when I found out I was being redistributed. I've seen those people intentionally edge out resources from Division "D" to replace them with external contractors, but they luckily left me alone. I didn't understand what was going on at the time, but now that I'm starting to see more of the corporate politics I'm just disgusted that these VPs are screwing with people's lives and livelihoods just so they can build their little fiefdoms. I'd accept it better if I actually thought it added value, but it's just disruptive to the actual work us little people are doing.

This should be higher. They avoid written correspondence very purposefully for some issued.

this explains so much. i had a vp who would respond to detailed emails by walking over to my desk just to say "approved" out loud. i honestly thought he was just old and hated typing, but he was literally dodging the paper trail. the phrase "let's take this offline" or "can we hop on a quick call" is 100% just corporate code for "what i'm about to say is a liability." the paranoia is so exhausting. the next time someone demands a phone call just to avoid typing a simple answer, i'm seriously just handing them a [subpoena](https://bureauofminorsufferings.com/)for unlawful avoidance of written communication. if we are playing stupid legal games at work, i want to play too.

Not even that. By making it unlimited people are actually less likely to take PTO because there is no visible allotment or expiration. Plus, if they let you go, there isn't a vacation payout they have to do since there isn't a defined number of hours.

Yeah, our company just changed to so-called "flex" time off. It definitely ends up with employees taking less days off and they know it. For one thing you have to provide a justification for taking the time off, which of course you didn't when you earned and accrued that time off. It was just I'm taking the time because I have it and need to burn it off. Even if they always approve it, it's a psychological barrier to requesting it. And the corps have to pay nothing for accrued time (after the policy is initiated) when the employee leaves for whatever reason.

Not to mention they then don’t have to pay you out anything when you leave. Probably the bigger reason they do it. The first couple jobs I left it was nice to get that PTO payout as an added cushion, since depending on if you took off some time between jobs and/or pay schedules differ, you may go an abnormally long time between paychecks.

Who you know is far more important than what you know. No matter where you go or what you do, your social skills is what gets you promoted.

This is correct, and it's largely due to the fact that for a lot of these organizations IT is looked down upon because their functions don't generate any revenue for the company.

And they do it while still being c**** and stingy about the dumbest bullshit

Yeah, it's hilarious how much fiction gets squeezed out of this.

Root cause? Nah, they are trying to do what they can to bring it back up. Ain’t no time to do root cause and certainly no budget for it

I used to be in the 20% pumping out work. Now I'm in the 80% floating. The company I'm currently with as sapped all the fucks out of me and I do just enough to keep people from noticing I'm slacking. I use nearly 100% of the estimate on my tickets but I usually get them done in like half the time. The other half the time is me reading comics.

I was in the 10% years ago. then my old manager had the WILD idea of running a team member productivity report and giving it to us with everyone's billable hours highlighted each month. I think the idea was to shame the low performers. Unfortunately one of his golf buddies was also the lowest performer. And so what actually happened was everyone else who had been lectured for productivity while those two remained chummy.... ROYALLY PISSED. Oh and I had nearly 30% more hours than the next-highest staff. Who I really liked and was good at her job! So it showed me that I was working WAY too hard just to get dragged down by his golf buddy and have to sit through the same lectures about how lazy we were being. I dropped my productivity down to match the others immediately.

Yes. My team lead can’t do half of her job. I end up doing it for the benefit of the community. She gets the pay. She’s struggled bc I moved to working only weekends. Now she has to be held accountable for not doing stuff.

Companies implement ‘unlimited’ so they have less to pay out when an employee leaves the company. It’s a way of making sure there is nothing accrued. It’s not a benefit - it’s a cost cutting measure.

This year it's a requirement to use an AI tool daily or else it will negatively reflect on our yearly performance reviews.

I just got a spam auto-insurance email, and the gmail AI summary said this email is about auto-insurance and also it's about the recent Artemis II launch. The email had nothing whatsoever about the launch, so yes, I would say the accuracy was off by thousands of miles, and in many other cases I have seen.

I’ve had the opposite in pharma, it’s quicker to jump companies to move forward than to stick around. But it can bite you in the ass if the company hits a bust cycle(as I’m currently experiencing)

Omg. I worked for years for small-medium company (15b market cap). Everyone wore multiple hats but we were scrappy and got things done. That company was acquired by a huge company (260b market cap). The new company has a billion rules, siloed and every decision takes multiple hours long discussions and takes months. More than once I’ve said your exact words

TBH, this is a form of malicious compliance due to laws that require the jobs to be posted publicly, regardless if there's an internal candidate.

Hold up. You mean it's all c***?

Not surprising. You get what you measure and incentivize. Very common at large orgs, unfortunately. I work at a 5,000ish person org now and it's big enough to have capital yet small enough to actually understand how things work. My prior job that had 60,000+ employees the way to get promoted was nepotism or sucking up to the right person, and not making waves. If you were trying to do the right thing and it made some waves, your career was done. The floaters prospered and the change agents got fired. Definitely was a shitty company to work for.

I would say this is very district dependent. I worked at gamestop years ago and we had a very strict policy of not accepting games or accessories in the packaging. They could technically open it and go to another store and we couldn't stop them, but we refused anything clearly brand new (*stolen*). We also maintained county regulations of a "trade hold", which is that we had to legally hold merchandise (all consoles, games, and accessories) traded in for 30 days in case a cop came in looking for it. It really screwed up inventory counts.

I used to work at different GameStops and each one essentially had this policy. The first store I worked at was in the same shopping center as a Walmart that had a lot of drug addicts and homeless. We could literally watch them leave Walmart and walk directly into our store. This was like over 10 years ago but our district set up a policy of yearly number of items and/or cash value limit that a person could trade in for cash. This helped a little bit, but we sold gift cards so they just switched to buying gift cards and the policy didn't limit trades for credit. I remember doing one cash trade in that I really thought was stolen merch. It was multiple systems and dozens of newly released games that were all in new condition. Cords were still in plastic and twist tied, games looked like they had never been touched, etc. Cash amount was close to $1k. I processed the trade, took ID info, and set it in our back room being sure we would have someone come by asking about it. Found out, it was not stolen and they had bought it all from our store just the week before. Guy got a new job and blew his first paycheck on new video game systems each for him, wife, and 3 kids. He then got fired from said job and needed the money for bills. Guy just makes bad financial decisions lol

It’s a LOT of work to fire someone. You spend so much time documenting, coaching, giving feedback, creating PIPs, consulting HR, documenting more and more. It was less time just to deal with the person. Huge relief to have that final meeting though.

As a local government employee, I see this a lot and it’s mostly to avoid the red tape related to the procurement processes. We could get it cheaper but it would require a year-long RFP process to vet the vendor and the contract ORRR we could piggy back off this pre-arranged, partner contract and get what we want now. And not waste thousands of working hours to get it done. Pick your poison.

I think a lot of it is risk aversion. From what I've seen, the government folks contracting out projects are not looking to rock the boat. If you go with big defense contractor A and it fails, oh well, everyone uses them, you can't be faulted for going with them. If you go with a smaller new company for half the price and it fails, you go right under that bus. If the half price solution works, great, I doubt the accolades make the risk worth it.

And likely also kickbacks in one form or another

The problem with such tactics is usually the high performers leave because they can find a new job. The low performers stay, because they wouldn't find a new job.

Joke's on them, I'm not leaving. Seems like every other employer plays the same games, so why leave this job?

This is every restaurant. We don't get PTO or sick days and if we don't get work, we don't get paid. If we do try to call out sick, we can lose our jobs. If you see a visibly ill employee in a restaurant, chances are at least half the staff are sick. 

After 26 years with my company, I got let go. Every year when we went over insurance, the HR guy would look right at me when he mentioned that only a few people maxed out of pocket every year. My special needs son’s therapy was often indirectly brought up around performance review time.

This is crazy to me, as the head of finance in a large Canadian corporation, our health insurance companies won’t even disclose who used what. It’s crazy that is common knowledge in other places

This has always been a thing. My dad was let go from a job when I was a kid because I have T1 Diabetes. Universal Healthcare should be a legal human right.

Well, aren't we the optimist? As a former software dev, I dicked around about half the time and still managed to be the most productive member of my team, which tells you what everyone else was doing.

I literally do half the amount of work I used to and I still outperform all my colleagues. Once my company was absorbed into a larger corporation, I figured out the big secret is everyone's dicking around pretending what they are doing takes a long time and lots of hours.

If you’ll allow me to piggy back. Re: medical insurance:choose 👏🏻the 👏🏻state 👏🏻funded 👏🏻Medicare plan 👏🏻 Then get a supplementary plan AS YOUR SECONDARY. Don’t be enticed by their private insurance promises. They will f*** you(the how list is long as f***) and once you choose them, you can’t go back.