• 3 Posts
  • 103 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle




  • Except you also have to have your card/phone and know your pin. It’s actually one of the hardest places to steal from.

    I have an uncle who used to do security for a major department store. This was over 40 years ago. They had an issue where entire racks of clothes were going missing. One time it was even two complete pallets, not even unpacked yet, they were received and then just missing. After the investigation they discovered a guy had clothes that looked similar to their uniform walked in confidently, released the locks on the wheels of the rack, rolled it into the back, another guy pulled up in a van, they put the whole rack in the back and drive off. He kinda looked like he belonged so no one questioned him.

    The pallets, again same guy just walked into back room found a forklift, picked them up, loaded them into a rental truck and drove off.

    Stealing is easy, it’s not getting greedy and being able to not get caught is the issue.





  • Some of it was probably due to being in a low volume high profit market. We had close to a 10x cost to profit ratio, and the profit per unit was 10s of thousands. Although alot of that went into R&D and quality etc.

    There are tons of ways to cut cost often. Another example is one time I bought a device to detect air/gas leaks. It was 1000 dollars. I walked through our production measured the leaks, fixed them(most were push on connectors so pull off, cut tip, reinsert, typically leak was done), took about an hour. Per the sensors software saved about 175k. Also prevented my company from having to buy a new compressor for about 750k as our current one was close to the limit of what it could support.


  • I “tried” Linux but never got it usable. I initially decided to run a vm on virtualbox to experiment. I tried Debian, arch, kali, Ubuntu and all ended up having an input lag of 1-2 seconds. Windows the system was fine. But I found my self unable to do basic tasks it was no bad. I don’t mean I didn’t know a command or unwilling to find a foss software equivalent, I mean it took several tries to get the mouse over the X to close a program due to input lag.

    OK I then decided to try a docker container with Linux. It got so messed up if I open docker desktop it displays an error that the container was unable to start, if you close the error to edit settings or create a new container it closes docker desktop, no way to fix it.

    I was able to get a wsl command line working but all I found it able to do is add 5 steps to everything due to having to start the command, start wsl, log on, elevate permissions etc.



  • I used to be on the gross margin improvement team. Basically our job was to implement projects which reduced cost.

    I don’t think a single person’s job was eliminated because of my work. I remember creating about 35 jobs. For example I had a project where I identified about $900k in potential savings per year. We had to spend $50k one time and hire an employee for about $60k per year but still saved about $900k.

    Employees are cheap(even expensive ones). Simple things like hire an employee to check something at step 3 so you are not paying people to do steps 4-20 will easily pay for itself if that issue at step 3 happens enough. Like for example that’s the whole point of unit testing software. Pay someone to write tests all day everyday even at an high salary, say $150k reduces costs of tech support, reduces cost of later testing, improves value of product, increases sales etc. If you want to be negative this is value stolen from the worker. But if an employee doesn’t make you a profit, why are they a employee? Like if you pay $70k for an employee who causes $50k in revenue… Fire them and make yourself a 20k raise. Now if you pay someone $70k and they make you $700k that’s immoral…








  • That’s not even code grief…

    Two examples that were far worse:

    1. My last company wanted software developers. They offered to send me to code boot camp and give me a promotion. The boot camp was primarily python. I complete and get the promotion. New manager tells me the code base I’ll work on is actually c… Umm ok. New manager retires a week later. I spend a few weeks basically teaching myself c. New manager is assigned. He tells me I should basically assist the senior Dev, ok no problem. Find out the code base is actually c#… Should be doable it’s c based atleast. It’s c# framework 4.8 based on winforns… No one in the building had heard of a unit test…the code was released to production on December of '23. Oh and yeah the senior Dev then announced he was retiring. There are no other c# programmers on the team.

    2. I told this story before recently. On a separate c# code base the “login” function had hard coded credentials in the source, which checked if they existed in a local sql database table with one entry(the hard coded values) and then verified the returned value for “password” was >= than 5. It then logged you in. Didn’t check if the password was correct or even the correct length just that the return of the select statement was greater than or equal to 5 characters… Just for fun remember that false is 5 characters 😂