Ask Lemmy

I used to be a funeral director. The majority of outsiders were unaware of pretty much everything we did. Often on purpose because thinking of death is uncomfortable.

The biggest "secret" is probably that the modern funeral was invented by companies the same way diamond engagement rings were. For thousands of years the only people who had public funerals were rich and famous. It was the death of Abraham Lincoln that sparked the funeral industry to sell "famous people funerals at a reasonable price". You too could give your loved one a presidential send off! The funeral industry still plays into this hard, and I've found many people are simply guilt tripped by society to have a public funeral.

Software Engineering. Most software is basically just houses of cards, developed quickly and not maintained properly (to save money ofc). We will see some serious software collapses within our lifetime.

Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.

Supermarket employee here. We have a "fresh" fish counter selling stuff like whole mackerels and raw salmon fillets and the like.

Each and every one of these has been frozen at least once - this is a mandatory health hazard prevention thing (to kill off parasites etc) and also basically the only food-safe way to transport them in great quantities over long distances without them going bad. They get delivered frozen solid, get thawed behind the scenes and then put on display / on ice for customers to buy. And then they're lying there all day long until someone happens to buy some .... people still treat the pre-packaged fish from the frozen foods aisle as a second choice, even tho those have NOT been lying around half-thawed in the open air for 10 hours straight.

Long story short, "fresh" fish from the counter is less fresh than the frozen stuff, despite customers commonly believing it to be the other way around.

Sysadmins have no idea what they are doing, we're just one step ahead of the rest of you at googling stuff.

Accounting is a goddamn mess. There's lots of mistakes in accounting, finance, banking, etc but we're supposed to act to outsiders like they never happen. Publicly traded companies (US) get audited every year, but no audit company would give a paying customer a failing grade. New grads are funneled into working for public firms - the 10 or so companies that cater to the world's audit, tax, and consulting needs. They're supposed to teach discipline, but in reality they only teach you security theater. You're worked to the bone until you either burn out or agree to perpetuate the system to keep your job.

And the only reason it continues to work is society's social contract agreeing that it has to work because we don't have any other options. All it takes is the rumors that the idea is failing - like in the silicon valley bank run - and we're all out of luck. With the speed of information these days all it takes is a few minutes for a situation to spiral out of control. It's bonkers.

I got into accounting because I enjoyed bookkeeping in high school. Now that I'm in it I refuse to work for anything larger than a mid sized, non public company.

The USA is run by unpaid 22 year old interns being supervised by underpaid 24 year olds.

Old people in charge are definitely a problem (McConnell, Feinstein etc) but the people in their offices doing all the heavy lifting are basically children.

I’ve worked with massive customer databases of over a million people multiple times in jobs I’ve had. And while each company has spent tens-of-thousands of dollars in cyber security to protect that data from outside hackers, none have given any fucks at all about who accessed it internally or what they do with it.

I’ve literally exported the entire customer database in two different jobs, dropped the CSV into my personal Google Drive (from my work computer), and worked entire databases at home.

No one has ever known I’ve done it, cared, or checked if I have any customer personal data when I quit.

The SLA on any product is not a guarantee the platform will be fixed in that timeframe. At best it is wishful thinking.

Oil and gas workers are normal people with children and dogs that care about the environment and they do a pretty good job on average of protecting the it. But accidents do happen in the industry, and when they do, it's sometimes not a simple "cleanup on aisle six" scenario. I've seen grown men on their hands and knees mopping up drops of oil in a cow pasture more than once.

Teacher - school districts are so afraid of getting sued that unless a kid is physically assaulting another student we have absolutely nothing we can do about it (even then, no guarantees). If your kid goes to a public school, all of your kids classes have one or two students that are allowed to do essentially whatever they want with no consequences.

Cell phone addiction is also huge. A lot of the “learning loss” being blamed on Covid is in part just the fact that students spend class watching TikTok’s or bullying each other in group chats. Don’t fucking text your kid during class. Vaping is as predominant as smoking was in the 80s.