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FORGOTTEN HISTORY: Deep dark industries secrets | History Defined
Humans spend a lot of time working. In fact, experts say that an average person spends a third of their life at work. That's plenty of time to get acquainted with how a certain workplace operates. It's not just a particular workplace that people get to know so well – many become experts in the industry in which they work.
Every industry comes with its own secrets and interesting things that happen behind the scenes. A person couldn't try out every single profession even if they wanted to, so, a construction worker might be curious about what it's like to work in IT, marketing, or even healthcare.
One netizen wondered the same, so, they asked the Internet: "What is your industry's deep, dark secret?" Workers from all walks of life gave their two cents: coders, funeral home workers, and real estate agents alike came to spill the tea on how their industries really work.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
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.
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#2
Most marketing campaigns are approved by people who don’t understand marketing.
#3
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.
#4
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.
#5
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.
#6
Nobody really needs us. Especially at the commissions we charge.
Real Estate Agent.
#7
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.
#8
A surprising amount of "IT expertise" is just Googling the exact error message faster than everyone else.
General Anaesthesia 53 minutes ago
The expertise is not the Googling, it's understanding the search results. Who in their right mind would pre-learn and memorize a kazillion error messages?
#9
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.
#10
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.
Kristy Marion 2 hours ago
I don't have any socials where I run into influencers, so this doesn't bother me at all. If people are interested in them or what they're trying to peddle, then good for them, I guess?! I'm sure deep down it's a miserable life and unsustainable.
#11
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.
Rick Murray 5 hours ago
Basic physics. Some reason facial detection cameras don't work as well on black people - a lot less contrast means a lot harder to tell one person from another.
#12
Manufacturers make the service menu hidden so only certified techs can access them. Most maintenance procedures and error fixes are just a click away, but you'll need to pay a few hundred dollars for a tech to come out and click it for you. You can find service menus and tech manuals if you look hard enough and save a bunch of time and money. I'm referring to a specific type of machine, but this is true with most commercial machines.
Glasofruix 3 hours ago
Those menus are hidden specifically because some of the settings might be detrimental to your device and you should know what you're doing. There's nothing worse than a user who knows just enough to be dangerous.
#13
Manufactured goods don’t pass quality standards because they’re good…they pass because they’re good enough. Not the same thing at all.
#14
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 ...
#15
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.
#16
Music industry. AI is absolutely wrecking us right now and destroying an already stalling streaming model.
#17
You really can go a long time without filing or paying your taxes without any criminal charges.
#18
Clinical psychologist here: it’s much less about how good we are, and much more about how motivated you are to change.
#19
Healthcare professionals do a lot of googling. We don't retain much, we just know where to look.
#20
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.
#21
Most lawyers are not that professional outside of the court room and their main skill is being very good at research. They are still susceptible to bias and emotion as anyone else regarding issues. This also goes for a willingness to take your case so if you are told no seek opinions from other lawyers in that same field. Some lawyers also say yes to every case they get regardless if they think you will win just to collect fees.
#22
My industry is basically an infinite money glitch. It is super niche and hard to get into, but you basically buy an item which you rent out to customers. The product costs $200 USD and it provides annual rent of around $120 USD every year. It lasts for at least 80-90 years. Requiring a $50 test every 10 years or so. It pays for itself in 2 years and then for the next 90 or so years it’s just free money. Fortune 500 company. The only reason it isn’t THE best stock in the world is because analysts literally don’t understand it too well.
#23
The developers/contractors/investors building utility scale solar rarely care about the environment. More often than not, they only care when it’s demanded by a code/regulation/permit.
#24
That little preview screen before you join a video meeting is actually recorded and all the IT people can watch it and laugh at you.
#25
Frozen foods companies really just want to sell you as much frozen water as possible.
#26
I work in IT, it's astonishing just how complex computers are and just how fast we pushed people to use them.
People get phished, install viruses and have no clue what they are doing.
But the darkest secret of all;
Nothing on your corporate machines is private at all, I can remote in at any second and see what you're doing if needed.
More often than not the checks that makes it say "administrator wants to take over your computer" during a service call?
That's a formality turned on by law, which can just as easily be turned off.
It's also hilariously easy to do this on anyone their computer, all you need is a USB for a couple of seconds and you can install a backdoor that you can remote in to from anywhere and one can access the rest of your network too without you having a single clue and if there are other weak protections in place (IoT being notorious for this) I don't have to depend on your computer being on, if you have a philips hue lamp, a zigbee briddge or something like a Chinese AC unit, if it runs linux it's rootable and thus can be turned into a base of operations.
Frankly, only people that work with computers on this level on a daily basis know how to protect themselves well against this type of stuff, and there's only a very tiny fraction of people walking on this planet that are able to do so, very tiny..
Glasofruix 3 hours ago
The amount of stuff we have access to is astounding. The only things stopping us from accessing top secret HR documents and other stuff is basically ethics and lazyness, but mostly lazyness, because it's a giant hassle.
#27
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.
#28
Ghostwritter..
I've been writing a lot of academic papers, discipline assessments, dissertations and even thesis..
I have deep knowledge in a number of topics that I "can't claim" , cause I don't have those degrees myself.
David Paterson 3 hours ago
Am hiring a ghostwriter for this purpose right now. I've told them that I'm happy to include them as second author. Up to them.
#29
Had a meeting with the whole department. Asked the AI Lead what our token budget would be per person per month. And if token usage would be a metric on our reviews.
He literally went to chat gpt and typed “what is an AI token?”
Fortune 10 company too. I’d suggest you all stockpile gold, silver and all the medicine you can find.
#30
Not my current one, but the precious one.
High end audio.
No one has any idea why their stuff is better. No objective criteria. They all say “it sounds better,” but not a single provable reason. The funny thing is that it’s not just the companies. It’s also the consumers. They read blogs, Reddit, etc, and learn bs stuff. And then they just pretend they are the experts.
David Paterson 3 hours ago
I learnt long ago that noisy speakers sound better than perfect flat spectrum ones.
#31
The 55+ active, independent adult communities are full of people 85+ who moved there because it’s cheaper than assisted living. Many residents have full or part-time private caregivers. Not nearly as active or independent as it’s marketed.
#32
People decide which disease to cure with their medical research based on available funding, not on how much people or the world need the treatment.
#33
Finance / Macroeconomics.
No one knows. The charts don’t mean anything.
The economy does not equate to the stock market.
Invest your money in ETFs and don’t watch the markets. Wait a few decades.
#34
Not industry specific, but sometimes when you call a business you are not actually talking to someone who is directly working for the company. This is why sometimes when you make a call things don’t get done or that they don’t get done at the time of the call. When this happens, it’s best to find contact info of a specific person that works for the company and reach out to them.
I once was a call agent for various schools across the US during COVID. It was wild. You would call me if you needed info updated, sign up for courses, make a payment, report if you are locked out of the building, etc. I had no power to help with any of that. My job was to convince you to send an email. Many times the email just went to another agent rather than the school itself. Before I knew that I wasn’t allowed to do this, I would tell callers info from a staff directory to get the help they needed.
It was very messed up because students and staff couldn’t speak to anyone in person and it can take 3 days or so to get a reply back by email.
#35
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.
#36
Biotech is responsible for incredible advancements in health and science.
It’s also an extremely wasteful industry, like more than I’m comfortable with. So much plastic in pipette tips alone.
Ace 13 minutes ago
Whatcha gonna do? Just like in clinical medicine, sterility is a base requirement, you can;'t take chances by just washing and reusing that sort of stuff, and even where sterilisable alternatives may be available, the cost of manufacture and sterilisation, and indeed the carbon/environmental footprint, would usually be much higher than the use-once-and-discard approach that's currently the norm.
#37
I only know of one lawfirm that will never take more than half of the total money recovered in a lawsuit for an injured client. The money being recovered to compensate the injured client for their injury. And they get less than half.
This does not happen in every case. But that it happens at all disgusts me.
#38
Every single concert uses prerecorded tracks and autotune live. The singers are singing, and the instrumentalists are playing, but there are always tracks and autotune.
David Paterson 3 hours ago (edited)
"concert" here excludes symphony and chamber music concerts.
#39
We don't use things because they're the best and safest, we use what companies are tooled for that they've been using for decades. Which is concerning because it's the explosives industry. We could be making far safer and more environmentally friendly because they'd be moderately more expensive.
#40
A lot of money is spent on consulting companies to find out what features consumers really want…
Then some upper management bozo just pulls something out of nothing and says that he “feels” that consumers would “want” something.
#41
Most patients assume all physicians have passed a national exam in their specialty. Not true.
In the U.S., doctors can legally call themselves specialists after residency alone. Example: complete a urology residency and you can practice as a “urologist” even if you never passed (or never took) the specialty board exam.
Board certification is separate and may involve difficult written boards, oral boards, case review, and ongoing recertification through groups like the American Board of Medical Specialties.
Though a non-board-certified doctor may be excellent, board certification is a valuable litmus test if patients want reassurance that a physician met national specialty testing standards.
Meanwhile, NPs and PAs must pass national board exams to practice.
Most people have no idea this distinction exists.
#42
My job has so many regulations and manuals that no one ever reads them all. There's thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pages of dense technical instructions, most of which you'll never need, or just don't apply to what you're currently doing. We open the manuals when someone's staring over our shoulder or we don't know what we're doing and want to check the three pages that have the steps we need.
#43
Craft brewer here - the majority of Breweries never clean the heat exchanger for years - and it has insane amount of gunk which does get into your beer
Very niche but true.
David Paterson 2 hours ago
So that's the reason that most new beers go from delicious to disgusting in three to four years.
#44
Most expertly trained tattooers who genuinely understand what really clean tattoo work is and what great tattoo design work look like, will look at the vast majority of "professionally done" tattoo work and they cringe inside, even if they say nice things to the person with the tattoo. Only a very small percentage of tattoo work is really well composed and really cleanly tattooed.
Tattoo machines aren't just "another kind of drawing tool" if you really know what you're doing. There are mechanical skills involved in tattoos that *actually heal* with pristine line work, solid even color, smooth color fades, high contrast black & gray, and so on that are completely and totally separate from whether it's a good drawing or composed well, and whether or not the tattooer has artistic skills.
Then there's a great big gulf between what proper tattoo composition and great illustration/artwork, and stuff that's just barely good enough that the customer doesn't know any better. Yeah, there are a ton of great tattooers out there and some great work online, but the majority of tattooers are marginally skilled at best.
Sauce: I retired after 38 years as a professional tattooer whose peers always held my feet to the fire to make every tattoo as good as I could do. I was classically trained with an old school apprenticeship, and I have a BA in Art.
I spent most of my career around the many of the best in the business, was one of the very few tattooers involved in the convention circuit in the US and Europe back in the 90s and early 2000s. Back then you could only work a show if you were actually invited by the organizers. Tere were only ten to twenty shows on earth in a year, depending on the year, and no one wanted to invite anyone but the best. Brutal critiques, the scrutiny of the best in the biz, and continuing education were the order of the day for most of those years.
#45
Cybersecurity. Literally no company invests what it takes to actually be secure online. I have worked at multibillion dollar payroll and credit card companies. AI is not going to improve this situation.
#46
99% of college professors have no knowledge or interest in pedagogy (best practices in how to teach). 100% of higher ed administrators don’t care.
#47
This is from my last job: It doesn't matter what race you are, if you look poor, security/loss prevention is going to watch you.
#48
We know you're more likely to buy when we inflate the pricing to convince you it's special.
Rose the Cook 5 hours ago
That is the trouble with some people. If the price isn't exorbitant that means it isn't any good.
#49
The $1000+ day rate is essentially just a fee to gatekeep a job that anyone could become an expert operator in, with two four hour courses. Honestly, at this point the job can be done by any teenager with ai, but no one is going to admit it... Will just continue to make it look and sound 1000% more complicated so fewer people look into what it takes to get the job.... Next to nothing - not even provable prior experience.
#50
They tell us to use bad product or expired food when shipments are late. We can give any extra to homeless people in the area or they've threatened to fire us.
#51
A lot of the stuff you buy from snap on is the exact same as the stuff at harbor freight one gets a different sticker or a little fancier over molding. Internals are made in the same factory on the same line just different customers.
#52
The amount of technicians working at Air Traffic facilities who have no idea how the systems work or can be restored I would say approaches 75%. Some don’t even know where some of the components to systems are in the buildings. And these are techs who have been there for 15-20yrs.
#53
Public safety despite all the training / equipment and resources. In a major emergency we’re flying by the seat of our pants. The moniker adapt and over come is there for reason.
#54
Most people who work backstage in live entertainment live in brutal poverty.
Unless you're in a high ranking position *and* with a good union, working in the music industry is utterly miserable and you can expect to make roughly what you would be making at a full time fast food job.
#55
Everything is either bought at the lowest price OR is within the acceptable budget they can get away with without being sued. You think you are getting the best ingredients, care, or service but it’s what they could afford. I’ve seen this happen across multiple industries like restaurants, healthcare, etc.
#56
Outsourcing happens so fast, with AI tools like accent matching we won’t even be able to tell most of the time.
#57
I work in a virtual call centre for a mobile phone company. The darkest secret is that the shops openly scam people. They do phone and broadband deals where they claim they are giving the customers a free tablet, but in reality the tablet is actually part of the overall price they quote them, and the tablet they are given is placed onto a contract that they are tied into for 24 months.
#58
A lot more than you think is being frozen at Michelin-starred restaurants. I'm not talking about the meat, but definitely a large part of the components in a dish has been frozen. And in case it's not frozen, these gels and little dots on your plate could have been lying around for a week, even in the cleanest kitchen.
#59
Paw Patrol is owned by a toy company. The studio that makes the show under pays and over works all their employees. The owner is filthy rich and doesn't care.
David Paterson 2 hours ago (edited)
Paw Patrol is the only exported American TV series worth watching! Don't ruin it for me.
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