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Ask HN: What is the biggest bullshit you have encountered at your workplace?

by sellingwebsite on 11/29/19, 11:13 AM with 20 comments

• by fold_left on 11/30/19, 12:02 AM

  A 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.

• by alexfromapex on 12/2/19, 1:13 PM

  A new exec joined our team and threatened, in a very careful way as to not technically sound like a threat, to fire anyone that didn’t memorize the company mission statement in order to be able to publicly recite it at our team meetings. This same terrible exec fired 3 people in our department within a period of 6 months and hired two of his personal friends into management positions they were ostensibly qualified for and wanted everyone to track their tasks in Microsoft Excel documents instead of JIRA because he used it to create dashboards for himself.

• by vanusa on 12/2/19, 6:21 PM

  Off the top of my head:

  * Overtly lying, in black and white, on a performance review.

  * Me: "So you said [at a meeting] that you 'know that X [what another team is working on] won't scale.' Can you explain how it works and why it won't scale?" They: mutter incoherently for a half a minute, then find an excuse to bolt the scene

  * Finding out later that this person was promoted to "senior" management

  * Reporting that so-and-so left "for health reasons" when everyone in direct contact with the person knows it was due to a lack of trust and confidence in the very person saying that. And the non-stop bullshit that day-to-day life seems to run on in that environment, generally.

  * "There's no bullshit here", said by the same person (one of the co-founders).

  Really, they're all my favorites. But it's not about any particular incident. It's just the way a lot of these people are.

• by trumbitta2 on 11/29/19, 4:34 PM

  A 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.

• by inate77 on 12/2/19, 6:55 PM

  The Union, and there forked tongue ramblings. Normally I'm for unions, but recently we were in negotiations for about a year, and when it came down to strike authorization meetings they fed us with so much BS to get us to vote to strike in order to make our employers give us more money. Things they stated they were not going to give up, ended up being given up.

• by bananapear on 12/1/19, 11:10 AM

  Hotdesking, to provide a “variety of activity-based work settings” (i.e. a few sofas and stools in offices, mainly to make them too uncomfortable to sit in there all day) and to “facilitate diversity and inclusion goals”.

  In reality it’s hard to find coworkers, people spend more time emailing instead of talking, and everyone is angry that they no longer have a personal space.

• by burntoutfire on 11/29/19, 3:19 PM

  A manager showing a mockup as a real, working system in order to lock in a multimillion contract. That's more fraud than bullshit though.

• by algaeontoast on 11/30/19, 2:50 AM

  Being 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.

• by itronitron on 11/29/19, 9:36 PM

  A 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.

• by patatino on 11/29/19, 6:49 PM

  Fake dummy parts in software to avoid penalty for delivering too late.

• by codingslave on 11/30/19, 3:46 AM

  VPs of a large well known company hiring contracting firms that were either owned by them or passing them money under the table

• by Raed667 on 12/1/19, 9:28 PM

  A company hiring contractors without the intention of paying them.

• by theworld572 on 12/2/19, 6:08 AM

  Scrum.