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30 People Reveal Industry Secrets About Their Jobs That Common People Aren’t Supposed To Know
Every industry and profession has at least a few skeletons in their closet. Dark secrets that the layperson might not know but really should. When Reddit user Juaninamillion asked their fellow redditors to share such industry secrets, they started up a viral discussion that really got people opening up about the less-than-stellar nooks and crannies of their jobs.
Check out some of these industry secrets that you may not have known about and remember to upvote the ones that left an impression on you as you scroll down. If you have any secrets that you want to share, we’ll be eagerly watching the comment section.
Unfortunately, it’s not just specific industries that need some fine-tuning—it’s the mentality of the entire job market. One of the most widely known ‘secrets’ is how recruiters responsible for hiring rely on completely unrealistic expectations and having candidates jump through increasingly difficult hoops. While other issues are how new employees usually have limited opportunities for growth and learning within tech companies. Bored Panda spoke about these problems with IT and AI industry professional and founder of FastAPI, Sebastián Ramírez.
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Wearing gloves in kitchens is a goddamn lie. They don't offer any sort of protection, they're actually more prone to spreading germs and filth because people don't wash them between touching different kinds of food. They exist to give the illusion of safety and professionalism. As someone who's worked in kitchens, I'd much rather see a cook wash their hands than throw a latex glove on.
worked in a kitchen, can confirm. Just wash your hands people, its easier than fiddling with the gloves^^
I work with kids at a daycare and we see babies take their first steps sometimes but we never tell the parents because we don't want them to feel bad about missing it
I'm just going to say it: KELLOGS FROSTED FLAKES AND STORE BRAND GENERIC FROSTED FLAKES ARE EXACTLY THE SAME!
Source: myself. I worked in the packing factory and changed the boxes all the time!
Yep. Again, this is called private label. I worked in food manufacturing too.
According to Ramírez, current recruitment practices are working far from perfectly. Unfortunately, we don’t have any ‘silver bullet’ alternatives to the current system where in order to get a job, you have to meet expectations that are increasingly divorced from reality. However, he believes that there are some things that could help improve the way the job market operates.
Ramírez thinks that developer teams, team leaders, and others directly related to the job opening should get more involved in the recruitment process.
“That shouldn't be left for HR departments to handle alone, it should be a team effort. That's probably even more important as the area/industry gets more technical or complex. The same way athletes, let's say runners, are not hired based on the number of years they have been running, or certificates of the tracks they have run on, in other areas, like technology, we should get the teams and internal ‘experts’ more involved in that hiring process,” the professional explained how hiring practices could become better.
Corporate safety culture is not about protecting you from injury, it's about protecting the company from a lawsuit after you get injured.
When businesses like taco bell, petsmart or others ask you to round up to donate to a cause it is 100% for the tax write off they receive. They are allowed to donate money and pay less taxes. Instead of paying from their overall sales and profits they con customers to pay extra to do it for them. This leaves their overall sales intact while increasing their yearly profit by paying less in taxes. If you want to donate just do it yourself and give more then a buck.
It gets worse: sometimes they're donating to their own charities, which can have high "administration" costs or have hidden agendas (like religious charities which refuse service to LGBTQI+, or non church members) .
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Ya that makes sense. Every time I've gone to Maccas and seen that "donate 1$ to Ronald MacDonald fund" option, I would get so mad. I'd be saying like "wtf??? Why the HELL should I be donating to YOUR foundation?? You're a multi billion dollar corporation, YOU donate!!" Like seriously. That kind of s**t makes me want to burn it all down.
Also, your salary as an employee is an expense line item on their taxes that reduces their overall tax liability, yet they'll make you beg for another 3%.
If they give you a 3% raise, but save 20% of that in their taxes, they're still paying 2.4% more for your salary, it's not like your salary increase is free to them since they can deduct it.
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No, this is not correct. They cannot have a tax write off for money customers donate.
and check on line the charities that use the money for it's intended / and how much they use for administration Salvation Army usually comes out the best
When it's welcomed, I always take the time to explain this to my fellow consumers when I see they feel awkward refusing the store donation. Most people don't realize it, feel pressured to donate and get a secret uncouncious grudge against the charity... So them giving a few cents or euros helping the store get a tax write off may prevent them from doing an actual donation of their own free will when they would feel like it... Infuriating....
I have wondered about this. So ok, no more rounding up McDonalds or Tescos
And the fact multimillion dollar companies are asking customers for money.
This is 100% inaccurate. It isn't how taxes work - they would need to first recognize the income and then the offset of the donation.
keep in mind you will get the same tax benefit so be careful socialists will hate anyone who benefits from giving to charity.
So they get a tax write off for the admin costs. It encourages a lot of small donations that add up so overall a win for everyone. Why is that such a problem?
Yup. And Walmart's "We've donated X Million dollars to local causes this year" works exactly the same way. They didn't donate it. They raised it.
This has started just recently in the UK in MacD's and Tesco's, and occassionally I do, but if this is also true in the UK, won't be doing it any more.
A tip from the rich (and I don't mean myself): Buy a cheap car for around 200 bucks, do 100 or so of work on it, and then donate it at its Kelley blue book price. The entire donation is a tax write-off and is usually worth more than you spent on it.
Just wanted to give you a little perspective, from the other side of the coin, as someone who's worked in food-service for over 20 years. We don't want to ask you to donate, honestly. But they make us. We get bitched at, if our bosses see us processing transactions without asking the customers to round up. And we get bitched at if the amount of donations per day we collect is too low. They look at it like we're still not asking, even if we are. And usually, these things are set up as competitions, between all the stores in the area. If we don't collect enough donations, our store comes in low on the list, or God forbid, in last place. That makes our store look bad. And they bitch about that. Most of us hate the round up thing, too. I HATE asking people for their money. I feel like if someone wants to donate to something, they'll do it on their own. I know it's supposed to be for a good cause. But some people just can't afford it, and it makes them feel bad. And some just don't want to, and that's their choice. But we still have to ask. We have to.
To be fair, that's pretty much what charities do themselves, and many of them are either counter-productive (providing services that takes away from the community while simultaneously creating the need for their presence - a kind of self-perpetuating business arrangement funded by you), or are outright unethical (resources wasted or not ending up where they're claimed to be directed). This is just another example of your being emotionally manipulated.
I hadn't considered this, but a lot of "corporate giving" through workplaces who ask for donations that are NOT processed through payroll are the same. Pitch in $20 or $100 check or cash, it's deposited in a company account, then gifted to the charity in the name of the company.
I never add that extra 'dollar' for the 'charitable cause' they claim.
Yep, suspected as much. Tax rebate for sure. And the clerks always look badly at me when i say no lol
Because we get bitched at, if we don't ask you to do it. And we get bitched at if the amount of donations is too low, too. Sad but true.
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And that's how companies can get returns on taxmoney they never even paid and millionaires pay less on taxes than that guy flipping burgers.
This makes no sense. If customers donate, say, $1M through these point of sale donations, the retailer can deduct the $1M as tax donation, but that $1M also counted as taxable revenue, so they are really breaking even. What it does do is let them donation $1M to look charitable even if that $1M came from customers. But it's likely money that wouldn't have otherwise been donated, so still seems like a charitable thing to do.
I am a Romanian who has worked for a US military contractor. The DOD doesn’t care about the price of the things the military is buying. I once sold a bag of 240 hex nuts for 9000 dollars ( it’s not a typo) which i got for 25 dollars. The spending the DOD does is really as bad as you might have heard of. The more they spend the better. It is actually scary how much money they throw away.
He also noted that there’s a problem with people getting promoted: people need clear ways to grow easily within the companies that they join. “It should be way more common than it is. Anyone that starts as an intern/junior should be able to grow professionally to a senior,” he pointed out.
“It would also probably help if there were specific company policies asking or requiring employees to keep learning and acquiring new skills. It could be through courses, by tackling new challenges, etc. People would benefit from acquiring new skills, being able to be more productive, and having better chances of growing in their careers. And companies would benefit from having people more capable, more productive, being able to learn skills relevant for the specific job, while having happier and more loyal employees.”
Olive oil. I work at an olive oil bottling plant in Rome, New York. We had only one oil, but put it in 27 different packages, that sold at different prices. Some of the bottles claim to be aged and imported. Some claimed to be virgin, others extra virgin. Some cold pressed. One brand sold for $30 fir 12 oz., where another sold 128 oz for $12.
All the exact same oil.
Nothing about The Voice, American Idol, etc is real. Your votes don’t matter. Everything is pre-determined. In some cases they even choose your audition song for you, and if they want to tear you down for entertainment, they’ll choose something they know you can’t sing. And with the contacts artists sign, you cannot refuse.
Source: professional musician, I have not been on those shows but have friends who have. I cannot name names, them even telling me that stuff was against contract legalities.
Funeral homes are businesses, and funeral directors will absolutely take advantage of grieving people.
The most offensive to me are the cremation boxes. They're literally just big cardboard boxes, and should cost less than a hundred dollars. But they also make really expensive boxes, and directors will say things like "grandma would be more comfortable in this". No, she won't, because she's dead. Some of these boxes reach 1000 dollars, and of course are all just burned.
I used to work in online memorials and one of the funeral directors accidentally attached a funeral invoice to an email. Which I, of course, read. There was a $400 "transfer fee" to move the body from the chapel to the cemetery, but I know for a fact that particular chapel is on the grounds of the cemetery. Absolute scam designed to cash in on people who are grieving. Also the invoice was written in comic sans, no joke.
This one is a little trivial compared to others in here, but: wine isn't vegan. It's not even vegetarian in some cases.
The fining* process uses egg whites, and sometimes isinglass (fish parts). When I worked in a tasting room people would come in and be like "I'm vegan but thank God I can still have wine, amiright!" And I wanted to tell them that they weren't right, but I also wanted to sell them wine.
The clothes you find at an outlet (more often than not) are not "cast-offs" or overages from the regular store. There's a whole separate entity that designs and produces clothes at a lesser quality for outlet prices.
Starbucks corporate makes us have those recycling bins in the lobby to present this green image, but most of the time all of the garbage ends up going to the dump anyway because the facility doesn’t have recycling
I read that the coffee cups can't be recycled because of the lining that makes them stand up to the heat of the coffee.
I don't know that this is a secret but flight attendants and pilots don't get paid while boarding, deplaning, and delays. So when you're delayed and angry, so are we. We're not making money and still have to be there.
I work in a vet ER. If you check the resuscitate box on our form we will absolutely do our best to resuscitate your pet.
And I mean at least 15 mins chest compressions, intubating and manual breathing, heat support and reviving drugs. It's an all hands on deck situation and we take it extremely seriously.
That being said, I have never seen it do more than have a pet have a heartbeat and automatic breathing long enough for an owner to say goodbye. I have never seen an animal recover.
Basically you shouldn't check that resuscitate box. It doesn't do anything but let us fight for your pet's life and lose.
I'm a DNR myself. I don't want to go through that and I don't want the ER staff to go through another unsuccessful attempt.
when my sister's guinea pig was at the vet with cancer, we checked the box to resuscitate her. we knew she wouldn't come back once she was gone; she could hardly breathe and was struggling a lot. we checked the box because of my 8 year old sister to make her feel like everything that could be done was done to save her guinea pig. later on we asked the vet for the form back and un-checked the box. we didn't want the guinea pig to go through it but we wanted my sister to feel like we tried everything. the guinea pig died quietly and peacefully at the vet's office the next day.
Animator here. It's coming more and more to light lately, but big animation studios and game companies treat their employees like [crap] and pay them barely anything and expect them to work hard "because of the love for the job". And they can get away with that because there are hundreds of thousands of other creatives who would be more than happy to deal with all of the BS just for a chance to work at a AAA studio. Really it's not just animation though, the entire entertainment industry is this way.
(Comparatively) bad payment and working conditions are a pretty good assumption for ANY type of field that is many people's dream career, no matter how many degrees it requires. Doesn't apply to every individual employer, of course - but an upsetting amount of employers prefers to provide work conditions that are juuuuust above the lowest bar possible where they still get enough job applicants and remain withing the lines of the working laws as they are enforced.... and in dream-career industries with masses of people trying to break in, that bar can be very low indeed.
That food on your plate wasn't made with love or care, it was quickly made with stress and hate by a cook either swearing at somebody or being sworn at.
Doctors spend so much time in their specific niche that they know jack s**t about anything else.
If you’re rude to a Starbucks barista most of the time we’ll just decaffeinate your drink.
Good tip!! I only drink decaf (heart can't handle caffeine). Starbucks employees hate when I ask for a decaf coffee. They don't keep decaf brewed, and hate doing pour overs. They are always trying to get me to get an Americano instead of a drip decaf. So now I know, be rude, and I can get all the decaf that I want/need. (PS. I'm not actually going to be mean to people who work at a Starbucks.)
Almost every register nurse has what is called a blacklist of doctors she or he would not want even remotely near them should they need emergency services.
People need to take better care and precaution of who they choose to accept as their doctor.
That's why if you want to find a good doctor you go to a NURSE, not another doctor or referral service.
Mobile Homes are cheaply made and mass produced by people making 9 bucks an hour and don't give a [crap] if it's up to code or safe. Hundreds of people in a factory with little supervision, and the main goal is to get as many made as possible, with little care to protocol, codes and fire stopping. I got hired as a HUD admin, ended up doing inspections so we could stop getting fined by the fire marshal and the amount of crap that is overlooked and not cared about is infuriating.
Can confirm. In my line of work we visit a lot of newly built houses and the amount of defects that have been "fixed" by slapping drywall in front of it is insane. Also seen brand new buildings with cracks running through the concrete. I feel bad for the people taking a home loan for 30+ years to live in an already broken "brand new" house.
I work in the wedding industry. Every single service you purchase for your wedding has a marked up price because we know you’re going to spend it.
People always joke that most psychologists become psychologists because they are crazy. I've worked in close proximity to a bunch of forensic psychs for the last few years - it is true.
The question is if they are the kind of crazy where they are decent people with just a more personal understanding of the many ways a brain can be effed up, or the kind of crazy where they are too effed up themselves to realize how much they can eff up other people's brains as psychologists.
Other academics will steal your work for themselves and publish it under their name.
...risking to lose their job, and definitely losing their merits, and thereby their career. The more serious problem is the imbalance of junior and senior researchers, quite often leading to publications with the names of senior researchers on it in addition to that of junior researchers, who actually did all the work.
Hospitals are not clean
The only really clean place in a hospital is the operating room, other than that the place is crawling with germs and whatever else has mutated on the floors and walls.
I worked for a movie theatre. A large bag of popcorn that cost the customer $5.99 (at the time) cost the movie theatre six cents to produce, including the butter, the kernels, the bag, the power used by the popper and the time it took the concession employee to fill up the bag and give it to the customer.
Yes, but in America, the concessions is pretty much how the theaters make their money. They only get to keep a very small percentage of the ticket sales, the rest goes to the movie company
I make super expensive stuff that is bought by several governments and some high-end consumer product manufacturers. One of the machines that every bit of product has to go through only works right if you stand there and poke at it with a stick. We don’t even have a special stick. It’s just a metal rod that fell off of another piece of equipment that we wrapped some tape around to make a handle. We always make the new guy do it, because it is super boring.
When renting a storage unit you do not need to get the insurance they offer. Even if they say it's "mandatory", it's illegal to force you to get insurance. Also the rent will increase yearly, forever.
Pretty sure those are beach huts. We have some fancier and more stereotypical ones down my way, but they also can be in this design.
At a hospital the straight cash price discount for many outpatient tests (MRI, CT, X-Ray, Ultrasound, Labs, etc.) can often be cheaper than using insurance and dealing with deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance, and on and on.
I’ve seen test billed for thousands of dollars to insurance cost a cash paying patient less than $400.
It’s insane.
In academia, you create content for privately owned journals like Science and Nature, but still you have to pay them. Also scientists who review journals articles for the peer review process do it for free.
If you don’t participate in this process, you can’t get papers and if you don’t have papers you don’t get funding and subsequently starve and die.
That is why more and more funding givers enforce so called open access (OA) publications. In that case, a fee is paid for the publication process, but the finally typeset and published article is available to the public. For example, the European Comission mandates this now for research generated through its programs. Similarly, the Norwegian state has undergone comtracts with major publishers like Springer and Elsevier, mandating OA, whenever an author working for a Norwegian institution is the corresponding author.
The official policy for customer dissatisfaction at a particular Canadian coffee franchise I worked at was, "offer them free stuff until they stop complaining."
Note: this post originally had 71 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
This series desperately needs fact checking. Some of these are true, some only apply to the US but would be illegal for example in Europe. Some would be illegal almost everywhere and may only be rare cases. And some are outright wrong.
... yeah, but it’s only a problem if they get caught. And if they get caught, they get fined, straighten up long enough to pass the next inspection, then go right back to what they were doing. Doesn’t matter where they are, people who would do something like that are going to do it...
Load More Replies... This is mostly “my business does this particular thing” so I’m going to badmouth the whole industry despite having zero idea what actually happens outside these walls.
This is not about different industries, it's about what industries do in the USA. I am getting so sick of the assumption that what happens in the USA is standard world-wide.
I don’t think that’s the assumption, at least in this post. People are sharing their experiences on Reddit, and BP is reposting. I don’t think were meant to assume this covers every experience everywhere, but that there are trends that these particular posters noticed. And, while some certainly have marks of being in the US, none of them say that they are only from the US. These might be experiences in other countries besides your own as well, even if they don’t match your own experience.
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This is an entire list of people who work for shitty companies, and assume that the rest of their entire industry is as shitty as theirs.
I think that most of these are "I worked for a crap company that did bad things so I am going to apply this to an entire industry". I worked at a Dairy Queen. Our store was so clean you could lick ice cream off of the floors if you wanted to. I have worked at bars that tracked stock and knew if you weren't pouring correctly and would talk to the bartenders because correct pours kept customers coming back.
This post needs more genuine insights rather than cynical comments on stuff we kinda already know. Also some fact-checking as Hans says below. I was mildly surprised by #6 and the revelation that Starbucks lies to their customers. No, sorry; that was a lie. I wasn´t surprised at all.
I just find it baffling as a concept, that in US you pay for basic Healthcare. My mother had a heavy stroke last summer so she is constantly doing tests and getting medication. She has spent in total 50days in hospital within a year. For the nights in hospital WE PAID NOTHING! For the many exams she does, we contribute a little just because we use private exam centers. For example for a €400 CT and full blood tests set, we pay €35. If we went to a hospital WE WOULD PAY NOTHING. For her pills that would cost us €250 we pay €25. How can you as a society allow people to die just because they can't afford Healthcare? I don't know man, its just sad what unchecked capitalism can do to societies...
#24 is NOT true. As a hospital's environment care tech (housekeeping) I can tell you I make sure those rooms aren't going to harm the next patient. I do think my hospital isn't the only one with stringent room cleaning requirements.
This series desperately needs fact checking. Some of these are true, some only apply to the US but would be illegal for example in Europe. Some would be illegal almost everywhere and may only be rare cases. And some are outright wrong.
... yeah, but it’s only a problem if they get caught. And if they get caught, they get fined, straighten up long enough to pass the next inspection, then go right back to what they were doing. Doesn’t matter where they are, people who would do something like that are going to do it...
Load More Replies... This is mostly “my business does this particular thing” so I’m going to badmouth the whole industry despite having zero idea what actually happens outside these walls.
This is not about different industries, it's about what industries do in the USA. I am getting so sick of the assumption that what happens in the USA is standard world-wide.
I don’t think that’s the assumption, at least in this post. People are sharing their experiences on Reddit, and BP is reposting. I don’t think were meant to assume this covers every experience everywhere, but that there are trends that these particular posters noticed. And, while some certainly have marks of being in the US, none of them say that they are only from the US. These might be experiences in other countries besides your own as well, even if they don’t match your own experience.
Load More Replies... This is an entire list of people who work for shitty companies, and assume that the rest of their entire industry is as shitty as theirs.
I think that most of these are "I worked for a crap company that did bad things so I am going to apply this to an entire industry". I worked at a Dairy Queen. Our store was so clean you could lick ice cream off of the floors if you wanted to. I have worked at bars that tracked stock and knew if you weren't pouring correctly and would talk to the bartenders because correct pours kept customers coming back.
This post needs more genuine insights rather than cynical comments on stuff we kinda already know. Also some fact-checking as Hans says below. I was mildly surprised by #6 and the revelation that Starbucks lies to their customers. No, sorry; that was a lie. I wasn´t surprised at all.
I just find it baffling as a concept, that in US you pay for basic Healthcare. My mother had a heavy stroke last summer so she is constantly doing tests and getting medication. She has spent in total 50days in hospital within a year. For the nights in hospital WE PAID NOTHING! For the many exams she does, we contribute a little just because we use private exam centers. For example for a €400 CT and full blood tests set, we pay €35. If we went to a hospital WE WOULD PAY NOTHING. For her pills that would cost us €250 we pay €25. How can you as a society allow people to die just because they can't afford Healthcare? I don't know man, its just sad what unchecked capitalism can do to societies...
#24 is NOT true. As a hospital's environment care tech (housekeeping) I can tell you I make sure those rooms aren't going to harm the next patient. I do think my hospital isn't the only one with stringent room cleaning requirements.
