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I worked at one of those companies that earned ridiculous money refinancing peoples homes during the run-up to the financial crisis. (Yes, I now know it was qu

I worked at one of those companies that earned ridiculous money refinancing peoples homes during the run-up to the financial crisis. (Yes, I now know it was quite unethical) They had a boiler room team of salespeople who made an insane amount of money. We are talking six figures a month. They were not at all highly skilled or had any financial background or degree. Their bonuses could be a luxury car. (or once a horse). I worked on the IT side. We made the software that basically did all the work. It included instructions of a spiel to sell loans, how to get around various excuses and such. And it did all the work with filing the required paperwork ensuring all the required information was there, sending out information to the people who refinanced all that crap. You could, in practice, take someone from the street, set them up with this software and they could sell loans. (this is not as far fetched as it may sound). I have so many stories about my time there but anyways, the IT team was not at all highly paid, nor very appreciated. One Christmas we knew we were getting a bonus, and given what we knew about bonuses being handed out we were kinda excited. Wanna guess what it was? A $50 gift card for a ham.

radcon 7y ago
> A $50 gift card for a ham. Sounds like they were a little too inspired by National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I guess the Jelly of the Month Club was all sold out though.
lttlrck 7y ago
Thanks! now I feel better about my $50 Amazon Gift card...
WorldMaker 7y ago
There's something about that particular (shady) business model of ethically questionable work that over-values "commission activity" and under-values technical achievement that makes it possible. A past employer used the software we built to create a commissions lottery [1] for a call center floor, and paid huge commissions to an "R&D team" that "value added", but really just created idiotic Access reports from the software's databases (sometimes bringing the Production databases to their knees until we started forcing them to use clones and BI data lakes), but software development was a "cost center" ineligible for commissions, despite doing all the "real" work (including any and all efficiency gains). At one point the executives convinced themselves despite huge turnover that they were somehow magically hiring "better" call center staff. I feel somewhat confident that that companies misplaced ideas of work/efficiency/how it was profitable were directly correlated with its misplaced sense of ethics. The "R&D team", for instance, seemed representative of the sort of bottom feeder scum that play political games well but don't actually have any skills of their own, and arguably at the end of the day that was roughly what the company as a whole was, a bottom feeder parasite playing politics well enough to make a ton of money surviving in an ethically dubious evolutionary niche. [1] We had proof that it was a really bad lottery, too. The software was something like 95%+ accurate in how much money was likely associated with each item that went out to the call center. To make things "fair" we kept getting a lot of feedback to make it as "random" as possible.
yellowapple 7y ago
Was it at least a good ham?

radcon 7y ago

> A $50 gift card for a ham. Sounds like they were a little too inspired by National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I guess the Jelly of the Month Club was all sold out though.

lttlrck 7y ago

Thanks! now I feel better about my $50 Amazon Gift card...

WorldMaker 7y ago

There's something about that particular (shady) business model of ethically questionable work that over-values "commission activity" and under-values technical achievement that makes it possible. A past employer used the software we built to create a commissions lottery [1] for a call center floor, and paid huge commissions to an "R&D team" that "value added", but really just created idiotic Access reports from the software's databases (sometimes bringing the Production databases to their knees until we started forcing them to use clones and BI data lakes), but software development was a "cost center" ineligible for commissions, despite doing all the "real" work (including any and all efficiency gains). At one point the executives convinced themselves despite huge turnover that they were somehow magically hiring "better" call center staff. I feel somewhat confident that that companies misplaced ideas of work/efficiency/how it was profitable were directly correlated with its misplaced sense of ethics. The "R&D team", for instance, seemed representative of the sort of bottom feeder scum that play political games well but don't actually have any skills of their own, and arguably at the end of the day that was roughly what the company as a whole was, a bottom feeder parasite playing politics well enough to make a ton of money surviving in an ethically dubious evolutionary niche. [1] We had proof that it was a really bad lottery, too. The software was something like 95%+ accurate in how much money was likely associated with each item that went out to the call center. To make things "fair" we kept getting a lot of feedback to make it as "random" as possible.

yellowapple 7y ago

Was it at least a good ham?