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I worked on a penny-bidding site. These guys "auctioned" items like PlayStation, tvs, cars to the user who placed the final bid on an item after 60 seconds of no further bids. Each bid would increase the final price by 1 pence/cent, but each bid would cost 50 pence/cents. You could "win" a $20,000 car for $500.37 and the house would have taken 50,037*50 cents. It might be okay if that was it -- but I was asked to cod…
Is that even legal?
I suspect you're not going to get many personal stories here because it would be self-incriminating. But I have a couple from some people I know in tech. 1. I know the guy who, pre-Snowden, actually designed many of the pieces of network gear needed for the dragnet. His perspective was basically: Yes it's wrong, but what do I know? I just design electronic circuits. 2. Same guy also mentioned how at another company h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing the first company is Plaid. I'm in the ACH payments space so we're a potential customer of Plaid and I vaguely remember a presentation or something where they (Dwolla + Plaid) promise merchants the ability to grab 12 months worth of transaction history from a user's bank account. Could be wrong about that. I do know for sure I made a mental note to myself to never use Plaid as a consumer.
Well, since you already guessed it: yes, it was Plaid.
I worked on a penny-bidding site. These guys "auctioned" items like PlayStation, tvs, cars to the user who placed the final bid on an item after 60 seconds of no further bids. Each bid would increase the final price by 1 pence/cent, but each bid would cost 50 pence/cents. You could "win" a $20,000 car for $500.37 and the house would have taken 50,037*50 cents. It might be okay if that was it -- but I was asked to cod…
I think it's more often referred to as a Dollar auction[0] - an example where a series of rational decisions leads to irrational behaviour. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction
I suspect you're not going to get many personal stories here because it would be self-incriminating. But I have a couple from some people I know in tech. 1. I know the guy who, pre-Snowden, actually designed many of the pieces of network gear needed for the dragnet. His perspective was basically: Yes it's wrong, but what do I know? I just design electronic circuits. 2. Same guy also mentioned how at another company h…
EDIT: I don't expect to receive an answer to this (and that's fine), but I'll give more color to my guess. Meraki had a side venture in internet connectivity-enabled location analytics which was more profitable than its actual router sales. This is one of the reasons why its acquisition price was so high. It has since contributed to a location analytics service within Cisco.
While working at a services / consulting company, I've been privy to cases where we put our own interests over the client's, essentially getting them to pay us to screw them over.
You’re kidding. I can’t even imagine something like this happening in business.
Worked at Ticketmaster.
Not me personally, but the company I started my career with (was an intern there for a few months). ERM software. When a new client comes onboard, install the product and database, but make sure not to make any optimizations, not even the basic indexes in the DB. Depending on the usage, the DB will get slower and slower in a few months. Then send a "consultant" who will simply run a script and add indexes etc and tes…
For the second part, I dont think about it as you sold a month of work. You just agreed with a customer that this task is worth X amount of money. If you managed to do it in one hour, that's just good business.