In a tech support role, one manager used to boast his team's average call-times were the lowest in the company. While average call times were in the 12-17 minute range, his team was constantly under 10 minutes. His team was awarded multiple times and his "strategy" was adopted company-wide to all customer service and technical support teams, including our internal IT teams.

That strategy was under a strict NDA, as we did not want to allow competitors to emulate it. When our call center would go bid on contracts, it became an awesome metric. "Our Customer Satisfaction Scores are on-par but we have call times 20-30% lower than our competitors!"

The dirty secret of the NDA that I was not allowed to disclose? Just hang up on people. Find a way to say, "Okay go ahead and do that and call back if it doesn't fix it." Then hang up. Don't wait for confirmation.

Eventually they came out with more useful metrics that tracked things like First Call Resolution which absolutely shredded this company and they went out of business a year or two later.

Whole Foods corporate has a form of “suggestions” inbox. Apparently it was very well received, but turns out there is no one monitoring it. Placebo effect I guess.

Was never bound to an NDA somehow, but sat in to oversee the technical aspects of Herbalife meetings. We’re talking meetings with the highest level sellers and their board. They spoke about how to manipulate low income and “unintelligent” people, to make them millions of dollars. How to teach others to scam others to make them more money.

Walmart corporate office puts a screensaver on all their workers' computers with a message urging them to donate to an emergency fund for their FT or near-FT warehouse and retail workers… instead of giving them healthcare or PTO. Walmart retail and warehouse workers are kept just below FT so they can't get benefits, and the vast majority receive government benefits. Your taxes are subsidizing millions in benefits for the richest company in America so the richest CEO in America is richer.

I worked for a company that made DJ equipment, turntables etc. They put a metal plate in their cheaply made turntables so they were the same weight as Technics when in reality they were plastic garbage.

About 20 years ago I signed an NDA with a very large record company regarding their attempts to get into selling their catalog online. Streaming, sales, etc. It was a minefield because they were still wary of angering high street retailers, and that's where the charts came from. These attempts were frustrated by their top level corporate guys. One week they all went to a "what is an MP3" conference in Buenos Aires to get them up to speed. The thing is, they spent so much time partying the only talk which seemed to stick was the scare tactics about how teens could scrape MP3s from the web, and that those could be copied and redistributed easily.

When they came back, every item in the catalog was ordered to be scrubbed from the web. No 30 second previews, nothing should be audible. Not a hint of audio. Lock it all down. Put all the tapes in a chest and seal it with concrete at the bottom of the sea. That's gonna make everyone go back to CDs. Good old profitable CDs.

The private school I worked for was for students identified with giftedness..The owner of the school administered the giftedness test. Can you pay the tuition? You're gifted! Can your sibling pay? Them too! Your cousin? Neighbour? Kid you know across town? You're all gifted!

I worked at a cancer charity and half the people would order things for themselves and charge it to the charity. An eye-opening job for a 16 year old.

At my old job, Pam helped me reallocate my client’s ad scheduling so I could invoice out a little extra for the last month of December 2014, helping me hit my yearly budget. I got let go two weeks after that and I believe the original plan was to fire me under the justification of missing my yearly budget. Instead I got a severance of $15,000. I believe Pam knew or heard what the lay of the land was and helped me out. Appreciate you, Pam!

I worked for a hotel that had no internet connection starting around 1 am to 6 am. Like clockwork, every night. Idk if it was just a system fault or if it was cost cutting. But without internet, the security cameras didn't work or record anything. The fire alarm system didn’t work either. So if we had a fire that started at 3 am for example, unless someone else driving by called it in, I have no idea what would have happened.

One night we had an assault in the parking lot. The police needed camera evidence and our cameras didn't record anything because the internet was out. So that was fun explaining to the detectives.

Worked in technical customer support for an IT/hardware company. We were sold a bad batch of chips from a supplier. The chips caused random 'watchdog' resets which would cause random crashes/reboots. The company got a settlement to remediate it, but the MBA/legal types deemed it too expensive to fix. We had very strict talking points when our customers would report this issue. Everyone in the support team knew what the issue was, and had each worked several cases of it. But our 'script' made us act stupid like it was a unique case that had never happened before. It is kind of hard to do that when you have replaced multiple units for the same customer in several weeks, but if you diverted from the talking points, you got counseled by management. This issue caused several very high level outages/issues for many of our customers. We knew why, and were told to 'act dumb' and bury it in process and procedures so that we didn't take the hit on needing to replace the known faulty hardware.

In Prince George's County Maryland, county transit bus drivers are instructed that following an accident, they are not to speak to anyone until a supervisor arrives on the scene. An approved method for not talking, especially to other drivers involved, is to feign injury. There's actually money allotted to pay the fines related to wasting 911 and emergency resources, because analysts determined it was cheaper than costs associated with drivers accidentally admitting fault. There's also an entire audit and analysis team related to accidents because of the sheer volume of people who falsely claim to be on a bus during an accident.

Intel Corporation used to go around to colleges and hold programming contests, and to the winner they'd give a mid-grade laptop and a gaudy trophy. Back at corporate, some of these winning code bases would get tens of millions of dollars poured into them in attempts to get them to product release.

I briefly worked at a university in South Florida in the late 90's and early 00's. I was chosen to be on an Academic Integrity team, basically reviewing claims of plagiarism and cheating and deciding between the five of us whether it was valid or not. We were made to sign NDA's when we accepted the invite to be a part of the team.

There were three instances where an employee that was taking classes there clearly cheated, and the issue was brought to our attention. Those three times, the cheating was blatant. All three times, we were told to let it go, as it would look bad for the university to have it get out.

I'm not sure if this is common for other universities, but at the time, I was under the impression that it was common practice everywhere. It was ultimately one of the main reasons I ended up quitting. I was, and still am disgusted by it.

Fortune 500, Real Estate, a long time ago:

”We know about the black mold problem. We always knew. We do not disclose it. We intentionally do not look into it. We don't want to know exactly what kind it is, because if it's dangerous then we legally have to spend money to fix it. The only department that is allowed to talk about the black mold problem is Press and PR because only they know how to bury it correctly.”

That was not a great work culture.

I once got hurt at work, a concussion specifically, on Camera. I have a history with concussion-like symptoms. I was 99% sure I hit my head but I lost all memory of the accident. I ended up missing a few weeks of work due to the severity. I wasn't 100% sure if I had some sort of mental breakdown so asked to see the video so that I could confirm my injury.

They flat out refused to let me see the video and told me there was no evidence that I had hit my head. I offered to sign away any rights to sue and I wasn't even asking them for hospital bills or paid time off. Long story short, I sued them, I won, and had to sign an NDA. I got my wages and hospital bills paid that I wasn't even asking for, and was finally able to get the video. It was a 100%, no-doubt a head injury, complete with a loud bonking sound effect and me falling down and leaving a dent in the bulkhead that I hit.

After the fact the office staff told me that they were under orders from upper management to lie and say they didn't see anything on the tape. They said this was standard for anyone who gets hurt.

I've seen an early cut of “John Wick 2” where all of the animal handlers are running around on screen in green spandex bodysuits. Running alongside the horses, carrying leads for the dogs, etc. Just all of these people who are invisible to the actors and the rest of their world.

Hasbro has tried to make the following two films:

Stretch Armstrong - a gritty re-imaging starring Taylor Lautner with a "Nolan's Batman" feel.

CandyLand - A LOTRs style epic for children starring Adam Sandler.

Both got pitch packets made before ultimately being shelved. Last I heard the Candyland idea is still kind of alive.

I worked at a startup that tracked employee happiness, supposedly so they can make employees happier, but in practice it seemed they were preemptively getting rid of unhappy employees. No need to wait for them to quit.

I worked for a company that overseas and enforces (self) regulation for one of the power grids in the United States. My job was to help secure it against cyber attacks and to help write the regulations that enforce those protections.

I had panic attacks on Sunday nights because I knew at work the next morning we'd go over the list of everything not compliant, and the lawyers would argue they were, and nothing would get done. Many times the lawyers would tell me that I wasn't "interpreting what was written correctly," then I'd remind them that I WROTE IT with a committee and if they didn't believe me they could go look at the minutes taken in the meetings. Instead, they would just document their "justifications" for being compliant and not actually secure anything.