The title says it all
Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
#2A manager showing a mockup as a real, working system in order to lock in a multimillion contract. That's more fraud than bullshit though.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
#3A customer of one of our customers complaining to my boss, who in turn complained to me, about "our product" not working as expected.
"Our product" being a demo of a completely different product I put together over a weekend, several months before, as a demo to our customer.
They rebranded and repurposed that demo, and sold it to their customer as one of our products.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
#4Fake dummy parts in software to avoid penalty for delivering too late.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
#5A former coworker claiming to a review committee that a published paper was an outcome of their research when the publication date for that paper was before the start of the research under review.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
#6A product owner that asked that the content of our poker site be impossible to copy, incase someone should try to copy it.
We explained that this wasn't a thing - even newspapers, whose product is the written word, publish each day's paper online and don't apply these measures. Reluctantly they withdrew the request but made it clear they didn't agree.
Later, that same product owner was asked to organise for content to be written for the customer help documentation. We received it in Microsoft word format and on closer inspection we could see that the content had been copied and pasted from a competitor's site.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
#7Being asked why I “didn’t understand who or how” horrible design decisions were implemented in a scrapped together ruby monolith by another team. Then being reprimanded when I was honest.
AMZN PIP / workplace principles are also in their own league of Bs.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
#8VPs of a large well known company hiring contracting firms that were either owned by them or passing them money under the table
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
#9A product owner that asked that the content of our poker site be impossible to copy, incase someone should try to copy it. We explained that this wasn't a thing - even newspapers, whose product is the written word, publish each day's paper online and don't apply these measures. Reluctantly they withdrew the request but made it clear they didn't agree. Later, that same product owner was asked to organise for content t…
The owner brought up functionality to disable copying because they themselves were doing it and didn't want others to do the same; otherwise they would not have thought of such a detail. It only seems a bizarre request because we lack their thought processes to arrive to their conclusion that they should disable copying.
Re: Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?
#10A manager showing a mockup as a real, working system in order to lock in a multimillion contract. That's more fraud than bullshit though.
This happens normally in securing such contracts. Look up the wizard of Oz method of product validation.