I worked as a techie in adtech, investment banking and healthcare.

With adtech, there is a complex inscrutable network of layered data brokers, and each as you see is the result of a complex but very fast auction of your eyes at that time.

The other aspect is that there are companies that collect data, other companies process them, and a third layer are the ad companies selling ads themselves. While Google is doing its best to monopolise the whole thing via Chrome, there are a lot of companies either piggybacking on them or doing their own thing. There are also “mom and pop” shops spying on you, not just Big Tech. You decide if a competitive or a monopolistic ad industry is better, I think the whole thing shouldn’t exist.

Investment banks DGAF about regulations, but are super serious about compliance. We had to attend like 12 yearly training sessions about not having the WhatsApp group we had. They are a weird mix of cutting edge and awfully obsolete tech, the feeling is that the business will keep printing money either way, so do whatever. Also, because since 2008 there are apparently regs that you need a higher up to sign off on some stuff, titles are super inflated. A Vice President might not even be a team lead.

I watched an innovative healthcare startup that actually saved lives be acquired by US big pharma. We sold AI medical imagery, not the quack kind, but the “proven by studies and active use to save lives” kind. European healthcare providers paid us 5-7 EUR per scan where it cost us 2 EUR to make one, and we were wildly inefficient, startup spaghetti code. A US monopoly bought the whole thing, along with a bunch of others like it, and billed insurance 100 USD in some bundle deal for the same thing.

Insert “I’m tired boss” meme. This was all in like 5 years.

Work in healthcare and while there are just so many dark sides a big one that’s not talked about enough:

The foundational model for our healthcare system is called fee for service medical billing. This means what it says, a fee is payed for a service.

I work in mental health so for me it works like this: I see you for 53 minutes, I can bill for an hour of psychotherapy service, cpt 90837 which gets me paid a certain amount. But let’s say you are not able to effectively communicate and need a third party to assist in your communication. I need to read your non verbal language and decipher any utterances you make while also communicating with this third party who acts as a liaison for you. I can add code 90785, interactive complexity.

This is a limited example because outpatient mental ultimately has a limited amount of billing codes. But if I am an orthopedic surgeon all of a sudden I have thousands of billing codes to utilize. Now I might pull a splinter from your hand and pad this bill with 19 services. Many doctors, especially in large healthcare networks, have either no idea this is even happening (billing is generated from their notes) or they are heavily pressured to do this by owners that are increasingly profit driven

This is not to suggest mental health is exempt because of a lack of billing codes either. You may be doing fine. Or I may have reached the limit of what I can offer you with my skill set. Yet I still schedule appointments with you week after week after week because you consistently show up. I need a paycheck, a great deal of mental health workers are contract employees that are only paid when they actually render a service, they aren’t paid nearly as well as you think, and they get no benefits whatsoever

This illustrates the point I am making. Fee for service billing encourages dishonesty and unethical practice. Other countries that utilize it have similar issues and when they adopt it they see healthcare costs and utilization begin to rise rapidly. China is transitioning away from the fee for service model for this reason. Unfortunately transitioning away is difficult because both healthcare networks and practitioners are incentivized to fight to keep it. Pay for performance, diagnosis related groups, etc reduce healthcare spending (sometimes substantially) but any time healthcare spending is reduced earning potential for healthcare networks and practitioners is threatened so there will be pushback

I work in the automotive sector. Most OEMs are only getting more aggressive and invasive with respect to your privacy, and there are regular discussions about how to monetize your data. I’ve been in discussions where people proposed to analyze your driving style to track you better, and integrate that with targeted ads in your vehicle.

Also, full-autonomous (level 5) is still a long way off from general use on (non-modified) public roads. Most of what you see on the road today that advertises being “fully autonomous driving” is monitored and controlled by underpaid workers.

I work in workplace safety, hazardous materials/waste handling and certification. Nobody knows shit about the entire field.

The government leaves the whole thing to the certifying bodies, who audit on form and process without any technical knowledge. The actual rule-makers are either the personification of regulatory capture, or completely oblivious about how their rules will be interpreted in the real world.

The companies doing the work hire independent experts who are fully dependent on those companies and can’t afford to burn too many bridges, despite the fact that they are the only skilled people making important calls.

The majority of the companies (naturally) only care about the profits and will gladly find experts to agree with them and pressure employees to ignore the rules.

And most baffling of all: the people suffering under all the above just see the safety regulations that keep them alive and healthy as annoying and needlessly slowing them down.

I live and work in a place where these people have permanent employment contracts and get paid by the hour. They have no reason to be idiots, and yet…

The underlying technology of the internet is a global game of chinese whispers.

Your ISP only knows what their neighbours know who only know what their neighbours know.

Ignoring the question, but still interested in your story.

You moved to China on your own at 16? That’s wild, almost unbelievable.

How did you get a working visa at that age?

The dark side of massage therapy? People like to joke about “happy endings” at questionable spas, but chances are the “employees” are victims of human trafficking.

As a hospice worker, I’d have to say the number of family members that withhold comfort medications from patients. We have steps in place for households with substance abuse concerns, so this isn’t an issue of someone taking their meds. This is people accusing us of trying to knock out the patient or outright kill them when we recommend pain or anxiety meds. No, we’re not recommending morphine so we can make our job easier, we’re recommending it because the patient is writhing in pain, has difficulty breathing, and screams out when you touch them. I sometimes wonder if the patient was abusive to the person caring for them earlier in life, and this is how they’re getting back at them.

As an engineer who bills to clients but in other fields too, the company is incentivized to push their employees to do overtime because they make more money on each employee per hour even if they pay out straight time for overtime. This generally encourages companies to keep their headcount low even if they have the work to support additional staff.

Contractors don’t fix things as much as charge for what we are contracted for. I might fix things, but I am able to fix far less than when I was a direct hire. The issue gets worse the more contractors there are, both individuals and companies. Shit hiring company policies make this worse. The structure of many companies is the cause of company problems.

I work for the Brazilian govt. That should be self explanatory.