59 People Share The “Deep Dark Secrets” Of Their Workplaces That Might Disturb You

Nobody really needs us. Especially at the commissions we charge.

Real Estate Agent.

A huge amount of software is held together by old code that nobody fully understands anymore, maintained by like 2 exhausted senior developers who are terrified to touch certain parts because breaking it could cost millions.

Not sure it's a secret, but it's something that a lot of people would never willingly admit.

I work in the supplements / nutraceutical industry. The fact is that the vast majority of people would be better served by adopting a healthy lifestyle (diet and regular exercise) than they are by buying one of our products. There are outlier cases where one of our products fills a real need in someone's life, but they are the exception not the rule. The reason i get a paycheck is simply because buying a product is so much easier than making a long-term change in behavior.

Municipalities will spend this years budget on stupid things near year end, so they get the same or more money in budget next year. Taxes always going up.

There is very little we can do for seriously mentally ill, demented, or encephalopathic patients. They don’t get better and there is no point of return in mental illness.

Most marketing campaigns are approved by people who don’t understand marketing.

Your friendly local funeral home is really owned by a giant multinational corporation and that nice funeral director is trying to upsell you because he works on commission.

A surprising amount of "IT expertise" is just Googling the exact error message faster than everyone else.

Manufactured goods don’t pass quality standards because they’re good…they pass because they’re good enough. Not the same thing at all.

Recruiter here.

A lot of time it's actually the hiring mangers who are being difficult and slowing down the hiring process. They tell us they need a candidate urgently and we will find 4/5 candidates ready to interview and the hiring manager will try to push these interviews out weeks in advance. Also they will interview candidate and not follow up with us at all. Even if they liked the candidate they will drag their feet letting us know. Being a good recruiter you still reach out and let candidates know what's going on even if there's no update but lots of recruiters don't do that so it gives us a bad rep overall.

Music industry. AI is absolutely wrecking us right now and destroying an already stalling streaming model.

Optical heart rate monitors don't work as well on black people. It's kind of an open secret but it's just kind of distasteful to talk about it.

Every story shared by a celebrity on a "non-scripted" show (talk show, late night, reality/game show; podcast, man-on-the-street like Billy on The Street or Subway Takes) is pre-planned, workshopped, massaged by people whose whole job is to massage stuff like that and practiced to sound spontaneous. Anecdote, mannerisms and verbiage are carefully chosen to promote projects, position celebrity for something or other (e.g., "I'm getting into politics" "I want to do a biopic" etc.). Nothing is real. Nothing is spontaneous.

A lot of non-profits don't actually do anything or do very little. All you need to do to start a non-profit is convince someone to give you money and then convince them you did what you promised you'd do with it. A lot of the "proof" provided to donors is just written reports claiming that something was accomplished. Many places run mostly on hype.

Some non-profit employees are dedicated, hardworking people with hearts of gold but they are never the ones that rise to the top.

Influencers are genuinely paid eye watering sums of money. A relatively popular influencer I know just got paid 50k for a few hours “work”. Another just got an all expenses paid trip to the other side of the world for a week (1st class flights) and a 250k pay check to sell you some lousy brand in a few instagram reels.

It sickens me.

Clinical psychologist here: it’s much less about how good we are, and much more about how motivated you are to change.

Healthcare professionals do a lot of googling. We don't retain much, we just know where to look.

News magazines:
Of course, we interview politicians who may be interesting, but if we invite certain ones much more frequently, it’s not because we want to promote a particular candidate, but because it boosts sales.
At the magazine where I worked about fifteen years ago, a cover story on President Sarkozy boosted sales by 50 per cent, whilst his opponents saw a 50 per cent drop almost Everytime ...

Food safety is more of a concept of an idea than a rule for a surprising amount of grocery stores, and it's not exclusive to any one company.

I was a paramedic for 42 years. I worked at top-rated, high-volume services. I would estimate that at least 80% of the medics who administer medicines to you have no clue what the medicine actually does in your body, or if it is even appropriate at the time to administer it, by not knowing all the of the relative contraindications. They simply respond to your complaint with a medicine that is supposed to fix your problem. Most medics also do the bare minimum after their initial licensure to re-license. It is scary how stupid many of those whom you trust with your life actually are.