Teaching:

Many standardized tests have ways to “code out” students. That means that their scores will not be counted toward’s the school’s average. This is primarily used for special education students.

Retail management:

You know those cameras you see hanging from the ceilings of many stores? Chances are, all of those camera feeds go to a central headquarters in another state. That headquarters gets the feeds from hundreds of stores at the same time. The chances of someone actually watching you live on camera are miniscule. Those cameras record things for future use. More often than not, they’re used as evidence of employee theft, not customer theft.

That’s true for small and medium-sized stores. The big ones, like Target and Wal Mart, have on-site security watching their cameras. They also have undercover security posing as shoppers.

Also, many retail chains use the same background verification companies to check out applicants before they interview them. If you got fired from one chain store, it will probably show up on the background check if you apply at another chain store. We rejected several applicants because the background check showed that they were “terminated for theft” or “quit without notice” from another chain store.

Large corporate giants often make decisions based on whims and 0 data. This is no joke.

I used to work at a top 2 food & beverage company in the U.S. as a brand manager. While there I was a part of or observed:

1. National multi-million dollar product launches performed because 'it worked in another country'. Either 0 research was performed or the research pointed against it.
2. Multi-million dollar advertising campaigns performed (despite poor testing) because we didn't want to 'hurt the relationship with our ad agency'.
3. Legal decisions on product names, flavors, nutrition data etc. made by whoever you can find. If the first lawyer doesn't give you the answer you want, go find another.
4. Hiring based on economic trends. Some people just happen to be in charge when everything else is going right, and then get promoted way too far.
5. National marketing decisions made by people in engineering, sales, etc.
6. National engineering decisions (including purchases in the plant, what lines to run, when to have overtime, etc.) made by people in marketing (including myself).
7. International growth masking domestic failure. Sometimes you can't help but grow in new markets, which totally masked absurd amounts of failure at all levels domestically.
8. Total unfamiliarity with technology. At all levels of the organization, including marketing, we (still) use: Windows XP, IE6, and Microsoft Apps from a long time ago. I got in trouble for upgrading to IE9 and Chrome, and was forced to uninstall them. Facebook and Twitter are treated as though they are the most mysterious technology to ever exist.

I could go on for a long, long time. Frankly, it was absolutely astounding to me that a billion dollar brand in a multi-billion dollar company could operate with everything above occurring daily.

Last summer I worked at Starbucks, and at our local Starbucks we have a drive-thru.

Often times, at the Starbucks stores that have drive-thrus, the person working the drive thru will talk to you through a headset. They will stand at the cash register near the drive thru window, simultaneously taking your order and handling the payment of another car at the window.

The drive thru workers aren't the only ones who wear the headsets though. In fact, nearly all the workers (excluding the front register worker) wear these headsets. What many people probably don't know is that we can all hear you ordering through our headsets—if you're being rude, impatient, and snotty, the person who will make your drink, along with 4 or 5 others, are listening in annoyance.

I knew a few fellow baristas who would set aside the rude person’s order for a few extra minutes and go on to other people's drinks. They would much rather prepare something for someone who's being pleasant and nice. Being mean might result your order taking extra long.

Just remember, no matter how grouchy you might be because you haven't had your morning coffee yet, the Starbucks baristas are humans too. Believe it or not, we have feelings, and we like to occasionally reward nice people with quicker service and maybe even discounts :)

Plus, being nice is a cool thing to do.

I'm a technical recruiter, and I thought long and hard about how I'd answer this question. I can think of two things that might surprise people about my industry or workplace.

1. Offer deadlines are often made up.
2. People would rather stay at crappy companies in crappy jobs than go through the job search/interview process - even if you offer them the moon.

Offer deadlines
I'm a technical recruiter, so my world is likely quite different than other types of recruiting. For engineering positions where there isn't a 1:1 need (i.e. there's not one position open that can only be filled by one person), offer deadlines are pretty arbitrary if even non-existent. Smaller companies are more likely to mean it when they say an offer expires on ___ day. But when large companies looking to fill big engineering pipelines pressure someone to accept an offer with a deadline, it's totally arbitrary. Trust me when I say if you come back to Google or Oracle two months later wanting to accept an offer, they're not going to kick you out of bed if you know what I mean. The equity side of the offer might not be the same, which would be entirely within their right, particularly with the ebb and flow of the market, but no tech company worth their salt is going to turn down the opportunity to hire someone they already agreed they wanted to hire. But sitting a long time on an offer also makes you look like a jerk, and can be disrespectful to the company, so I recommend finding the balance.

People don't like changing jobs
Technical recruiters get a bad reputation for a lot of reasons. One thing that absolutely is common knowledge among peers in my industry is that it doesn't matter how awesome a company is, how awesome the product is, or how much money (or equity) you throw at a person. More often than not, none of those things can entice someone to leave a company (or a role) where they feel valued, appreciated, or needed. I have encountered some of the most fiercely loyal employees for completely non-understandable reasons.

I've worked in recruiting for 10+ years. I've worked for big companies like Google, Nintendo and Nordstrom, mid-size companies like Facebook and Expedia, and start-ups like LivingSocial, and Lithium Technologies. I have reached out to 10s of thousands of candidates in my lifetime, and the average person would be shocked at how many passive candidates recruiters have to reach out to in order to yield one candidate hired. At times it can feel like a frustrating numbers game even when you're doing all the right things (i.e. not doing what 95% of most recruiters do and ending up the laughing stock of a blog).

At one of the companies I worked for, I worked very closely with the CTO on a hiring initiative. This CTO was also the co-founder and an incredibly smart engineer once said something like, "I don't understand why we can't just email people on LinkedIn about our opportunity? Anyone worth their salt should be excited about this." All the recruiters laughed.

Not so, silly mortal. In fact, throughout my career I've offered meetings and phone calls with CEOs, CTOs, COOs, and people of every other high and mighty title to candidates who kindly said they "Aren't interested." Many recruiters reach out to 50+ candidates per day and even that might not yield amazing results.

On the one hand, I totally get it. There is job security in being a good software engineer/ux designer/amazing person who can code as there are no shortage of companies clamoring to hire talented engineers. So there's competition. Yet, in some instances, I feel genuinely baffled. Some candidates I interact with are clearly sitting on sinking ships or working for companies whose trajectory and even reason for existence seem dubious (like Lockerz), or working for companies where I know on good word there are chairs being thrown in staff meetings and it's an openly hostile environment, or the stock is plummeting faster than Brian Bosworth's NFL career. Yet those same people have no qualms about writing me an email, waxing poetic on how much they love what they're working on or how they're not looking for new opportunities right now. And I'm all, "Really? You're really loving working on a product absolutely no one sees or cares about? You like pager duty? You like working with a bunch of jerks? Alrighty then. #respect"

I've summarized my opinion on the reasons candidates don't want to come work for your cool, "awesome" company:

1. Too much noise. This is a no brainer. Sometimes recruiters are our own worst enemy. I once heard that less than 10% of Software Engineers on LinkedIn receive 85% of all the recruiter inMails. We recruiters are most definitely the problem. I once talked to an Android Engineer who told me he receives two to three emails from recruiters every day of the year. The math on that one is staggering. So I can imagine when you're receiving that many emails about some "amazing opportunity" at a company and the recruiter won't even tell you the company name, you start to put everyone else on mute -- even the legitimately cool opportunities. There's also the relevancy factor. I have on my resume that I've recruited ruby engineers at one point in my career. I probably receive in excess of four emails a week from some random recruiter at a staffing agency asking me if i'd be interested in a software engineer role. I have zero engineering experience. Dude, did you even read my resume or are you just searching for key words? Sometimes, I hate recruiters. And I are one.
   
2. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know. Sure where they're working right now is a total nightmare, but how can they be certain the opportunity you're offering them isn't a total nightmare as well? Meanwhile, the candidate's thinking, "I think I'll stick with my current nightmare situation, thanks. At least I know where to hide."
3. Comfort. We are creatures of habit. We like to complain about things, but we don't actually like to make the changes in our life necessary to get the outcome we want. Some people fear rejection. Particularly if they know a company has a high bar. Also, some people just don't want to work that hard by starting a new role. Maybe their current job is easy (for them) and it leaves them more time to spend with their kids and family. They've been doing the job so long they can do it in their sleep and they genuinely like it that way because it frees them up to work on side projects they're passionate about. They might have a sweet deal where they get paid for 40 hours a week but only really actually do 20 hours of real work because they're the smartest person on their team and no one else knows how to do what they do so they've become indispensable. And now you're trying to offer them a new opportunity where they have to pay dues, and pay their idiot tax, learning new tools, a new corporate structure and play politics? No way.
   
4. No time to job search. Job searching is exhausting for a lot of people. Because I work a lot with engineers, I also find that for a lot more introverted personalities the activity of having so many intense conversations in a short time span can be mentally exhausting, particularly if someone is interviewing with more than one company. Opening oneself to new career possibilities can sometimes be a job in and of itself and some people just aren't ready for that.
   
5. You aren't appealing to their true interests. People who are good at what they do can't usually be "bought" by a salary. With software engineers in particular, I've found that the type of people I like, the good ones, they want to work on something they're passionate about. They're not trendy and they don't pick their technological pursuits based on TechCrunch. They're not looking to be famous; they're looking for impact and to carve their name in something unique and pioneering. They want to work with smart people. If you can't offer that in a clear and concise way, good luck wooing these types of people away from their pet project.
   
6. They feel valued and appreciated in their current job. People like to feel needed and necessary. When I worked at Nordstrom in the corporate office we once ran an all employee survey (among 40,000 employees) to find out what people wanted most. Money was not it. People wanted to feel valued and appreciated in their job more than they wanted a raise. No one wants to feel like they are easily replaceable. Even if it IS the case. This only confirms what every other job satisfaction survey in the US has shown. You will keep your employees loyal to you and they will stay longer if they know they are showing up to a place where the company takes good care of them (up for interpretation...this doesn't just mean giving tons of perks. A place could be filled with perks and still be a crappy work environment), they are affirmed in their job, and they feel like they are adding value.

The loading screens you see primarily on travel websites are artificial. Finding the cheapest flights, the best hotels, and whatever else you may be looking for takes less than a second. In fact, a lot of hard work goes into making all that information very easily accessible for the web app.

The loading screen exists because when the information is returned to the user as quickly as possible, he or she will often perceive it to be less valuable. It's as if the server didn't put much effort into really finding a great deal. No customer ever actually articulates that; but surveys, customer testing sessions, and most importantly conversion rates support the notion that when a seven or eight second loading screen tells the user that the numbers are being crunched just for this one query, the result is perceived to be more valuable.

Perhaps this is obvious to the more cynical amongst you, but I've found it to be an effective insider anecdote when people are babbling on about work at parties.

I used to work in the mining industry, in one of the biggest mines in Europe and one of the most advanced mine in the world. So, here's some random facts from 1.5 km deep (that's about mile deep in ye olde units) underground mine.

Disclaimer: These conditions refer to more traditional ore mines (copper, zinc, suphur etc). Coal, as well as gold in some cases, is bit trickier business as they both are deposited in low and long veins, so that there usually isn't as much space for high end equipment, whereas copper etc. is deposited in larger "clump", which is easier to mine. Also, as coal is low profit material, the mines are smaller and there usually isn't as much money to be burned to machinery, so it's more dangerous and messier business. Although, in bigger mines, I'd say it's still much more cleaner and safer than what the public usually thinks of.

Work conditions
Nowadays, in bigger mines, it's actually really safe and clean job. Down in 1.5km main level, everything's well lit, the walls are white (think of your basic underground garage), there are offices, repair and part shops, restaurant, sauna and even a cell "tower", so your cellphone works down there. Everything is done with big machines that have soundproof and air conditioned cabins, with MP3 players etc. The machines can also be operated remotely or even operate completely independently, by themselves. There are no (big) accidents.

Drilling
When drilling, mine designer plots the holes in 3D software (that the whole mine is modeled in), the machine takes the hole designs and proceeds to drill them automatically. Basically, operator only needs to drive the drilling machine to the right place.

Loading
Loading machines, weighing up to 100 tons (with bucket full of ore; 20 tons) and completely filling the tunnel (3 meters high and wide, 12 meters long), operate independently and the operator, if they so choose, can even control them all the way from home. The operators just fill the bucket remotely and sit back as the machine navigates autonomously to the drop point and comes back for refill. These babies cost over million euros ($1.4 million) a piece.

Lift
The spool for the lift going all the way down has to be positioned in certain compass direction as the spin of the Earth affects ropes that long and thus would danger the lift itself if positioned the wrong way. The lift itself flies up-and-down at 60km/h (~40mph).

Moving
It takes about a minute to descend to the main level (1.5 km) with the elevator or 40 minutes by car (11 km/7 miles), driving down the spiral tunnel (in this picture, marked yellow as decline).

(For scale, the purple "Timo shaft" is about 1.5km or ~1 mile deep and the white tower on the surface is 100m or 300 feet high)

Automation
Everything's automated to the level that the whole factory can be run and operated by two men (normal workday, the factory has about 250), both sitting comfortably up at the surface. Other operating and observing the factory while other operating the machinery (crushers, loaders the works) underground. In normal operations, the mine has about 250 employees.

Air
About 140 cubic meters of fresh air is pushed down to the mining levels every second by 450 kW (600 hp) fan.

Explosives
Average quarry (block of ore to be mined out) blast has up to 6-7 tons of high explosives and even though the blast takes place 1.5 km down in bedrock, it still can be heard and felt several kilometers out. There can be up to 40 tons of high explosives underground.

Temperatures
There are no seasons that deep as the bedrock itself is actually so warm that the temperatures down there are the same (about +25C) whether it's summer or winter, with -30 C outside.

Corrosion
Due the high corrosive environment (due the ore), your basic lifespan of a car is about 24 months, at which point it's completely corroded through and has to be scrapped.

Environment
When done correctly, mining doesn't destroy nature. In this case, there is a big lake with clear water and lots of fish right next to the mine (just few hundred meters off). The mine has been operational for 60 years.

Seismic activity
The blasting causes tension to build up into the bedrock, which from time to time is released as massive bangs. These can measure up to 2.4 in the Richter scale and can move the bedrock for 1 meter in the shear point. They can even be mistaken as blasts.

Weather
The mine actually has a weather system of its own. For example, in certain conditions, thick mists/clouds can form in certain heights.

From an old life of mine doing political operations and campaigns:

• When you see "handmade" signs at a political event, they're almost never handmade by the person who's holding them. Someone handmade them - probably an intern or junior member of the event team - but it wasn't the guy (or more accurately, the female visible minority or young person) holding the sign. Similarly, it's not just a coincidence that the messaging on the sign matches what's in the speech. Standard practice is to allow no signs of any type through the doors into an event venue, and then either have a table where people can pick up signs, or have event staff distribute them to strategically-placed guests.

• From the same discipline (when staging a large event), there exists a role called the crowd designer. Before the doors open and the cameras do their technical load-in, this person will have gone to all the major camera positions in the room and mapped out exactly which seats/standing spots will be visible in "the shot" behind the Candidate. These positions will be blocked off, and as people are filing in the crowd designer will pick photogenic people of the right visual appearance/category to stand in those spots. They'll be briefed, and then instructed not to move, no matter what. It's no coincidence that the people you see behind a Candidate are always super-enthusiastic, good-looking, and cover all the appropriate age/gender/ethnic demographics.

• This applies to most professional PR, but especially in politics - when you see a quote from someone in a press release, and it's not a verbatim quote from the person in a speech they just delivered, they almost certainly didn't say it. What would have happened is that the author of the release - a mid-tier position in a political office - would have made up a quote that sounds plausible, sent it to the Comms office of the person they're "quoting" for approval, and once that's received, both sides have deemed that quote "said", regardless of whether someone's ever said it in public.

• This is more a holistic point about political events you see on TV, but nothing happens "by accident". Even for the most minor event or tour, someone's been in contact with the organizers for two weeks, and has been on-site for three days already briefing anyone and everyone. That spontaneous person coming forward to give the Candidate flowers? Pre-approved and vetted. The safety signs on the wall the Candidate is walking by in a factory? Sanitized for possible negative angles. The everyman-esque ordering of a coffee while the tour bus has an impromptu stop? The store manager knew the bus was coming, and what everyone would be ordering (how do you think there was parking for two buses and a security entourage?). The forklift that just happens to be blocking anyone from getting a photograph from an angle that would show how few people are present in a venue? Not parked there by accident. The four workshops located in a row that the Candidate just toured? They don't usually work there. The training class that the Candidate just visited? It doesn't usually happen on this day, and the last one ran two months ago. The local guy in jeans who's standing at the back and clapping enthusiastically, but maybe not staring at the stage? He's the professional who put this on, and is already thinking of where his next event is.

I worked as a zookeeper for a while. Granted, the zoo I worked at was probably one of the best in the world, so this may not apply to every zoo you see. Some things I found really interesting:

* The animals are fed an individual, incredibly nutritious well-balanced diet that is planned by a nutritionist. Seriously. They were eating better than I was by far. Most of the food is weighed, chopped and prepared fresh every morning. All the food we had was human grade and ordered from the same suppliers that human food comes from. Animals also eat insects and stuff, so those had to be grown and "prepared" on site, but all the other stuff was stuff we could (and sometimes did) eat.

* Zookeepers work incredibly hard - most of them start their days at 4 or 5 AM to have the animals on display and the enclosures cleaned by the time the zoo opens. Most probably end their day around 3 or 4 pm. It's also incredibly manual (lifting, bending, cleaning, wrestling with animals if they need to go to their checkup)

* Zookeepers also spend a lot of time and effort keeping animals entertained - this is called "enrichment" and involves games, puzzles, hiding food creatively, exercising, etc.. Enrichment can follow a schedule, but it is a constant creative, changing process.

* There's a lot of zookeepers, particularly older ones that aren't particularly fond of humans. There's a reason that some work as zookeepers - it's because they like animals far better than people

* Zookeepers deal with a lot of poo. Poo has to be meticulously cleaned out of an enclosure every day because a) Animals don't use toilets (although we should probably teach them to) and b) poo in enclosures make animals sick. You kind of get used to it and de-sensitized to it. Animal poo comes in all kinds of interesting shapes, forms and sizes so they each pose their own sort of challenges to clean. No one wants to clean the chimp enclosure after Coconut Day.

• Working with pornography is not a pleasurable experience.
• Adult distribution companies are all about business.
• They take sexual harassment extremely seriously.

This was many years ago, and I've moved on to other industries since then, but the first job I got out of college...the only job I could get...was working for a website that streamed adult videos on demand. They also had a phone sex floor, though thankfully I never worked there. It was one of the worst jobs I've ever had, but it also taught me a great deal in a very brief amount of time.

My job was as a "Describer"...I would watch the videos all day long, take screenshots, and then try to write the most enticing copy that I could (which often all ended up sounding the same, and used far too many exclamation points). I got pretty good at it...I used to be able to get through about 20 movies a day.

Most people would say half-jokingly to me that it must be fun to get paid for watching porn all day long. But then they're shocked when I tell them that as a describer, you're in no control of what kind you get to watch. And we had to watch it all - everything that's legal in America, and sometimes stuff that wasn't legal but which slipped through the cracks anyway, and which we had to report. I'll leave it up to your imagination. I had quite an anthropological education that year.

(An interesting side note: what is considered "legal" as far as adult content providers are concerned is an extremely gray area. Of course, there is the obvious stuff that is just downright wrong...but if you look at the standard policy on any adult site which you have to agree to, what it states is that the content you're viewing must be acceptable within your community. That community could mean your town, your church, your household...it's completely up to interpretation.)

Regarding the second point, you might think that given the content, the people in charge would be the stereotypical drugged-out party animals like you see in the movies. Nothing could be further from the truth. They treated their content like you might treat couch cushions or blenders - it was all just product. They wore suits, had wives and kids, worked hard, and took it all very seriously.

Speaking of taking things seriously, I had never seen a company so serious about avoiding sexual harassment charges. It makes sense I suppose...a certain type of employee might consider the fact that s/he is watching adult videos all day long as an excuse to let that carry over into their work life, giving them permission for playful banter with fellow employees. But aside from what was on our screens, we were actually not allowed to have any X-rated materials displayed at our desks, on our walls, or anywhere within eyesight of another employee. From time to time we got calendars, posters, and other schwag from the producers...but it was all thrown away, or employees could take it home. Our cubicles were just like any other office's...except of course for what was on our monitors and in our headphones.

There were a few bonuses for working at a company like that. First, I've never had such good benefits in my life. The health insurance alone was so good, I got spoiled on it and have never been able to find benefits as decent (they paid a full 50% of all costs...I've never seen another employer do that). The holiday parties were extravagant, full-on gourmet feasts and live entertainment.

The saddest part about that job, once you got past your prudishness about having to watch things you would never willfully explore on your own, was how desensitized you would become. It wasn't just me - everyone I knew, the guys, the girls, whomever...started to feel that way as well. You could only do that job for so long before you began to feel sickened at the thought of coming into work.

That's why when I finally was able to quit, I was over the moon with relief about it. I don't think it matters how much you think you'd like a position like that...when you're bombarded by that type of materials for ten hours a day, you're going to burn out eventually. It's too intense not to. If you don't, you're probably one of the people making the videos in the first place.

EDIT: Including some of the comments from below, because I didn't originally think about including this info, but many people are finding my answers additionally interesting or mind-blowing.

Chris Bast: "had wives and kids" For real? Did their families know what they did for a living?

Absolutely, I met many of them at the Christmas party. I doubt their younger kids knew more than the fact that mommy or daddy worked for a media company, since that's technically what it was...but the wives and husbands are well aware.

Firstly, that's not something that is easy to hide from your spouse...and frankly, you wouldn't want to.

Secondly, it's just business, as I said. A paycheck. Their families knew that.

Quora User: How did you move on in the labor force after a job like that? It sounds like something that employers would scoff at.

To be honest, most smart employers (in the tech, entertainment, or advertising industries) actually value someone with adult industry experience. Adult distribution companies are far and beyond the most innovative; pioneering new advancements in media formats, payment models, and website features.

It's the adult industry that always determines the winners in the format wars. VHS vs. Betamax, Blu-Ray vs. HDDVD, and even the success of the DVD are all thanks to porn.

The company I worked for pioneered video on demand online, and created a successful digital rights management (DRM) system to avoid piracy before companies like Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and Amazon ever even tried it. They also pioneered micro-payments before any Facebook or iOS games did.

Adult companies are flush with cash, so they can afford to take risks and try new things. So if you can get past the content, there is a ton of amazing stuff you can learn from companies like that. At least, that's what I tried to focus on during my time there, and how I spun it in future job interviews. It worked too, I don't regret my experience.

Quora User: Wow. The comment on adult industries determining the winners of format wars blew my mind. Are there any research publications in this direction?

I'm not sure if there has been research done about their influence on technology, though that would be interesting to see. In my experience within tech, it's just sort of a known fact. Adult content has paved the way for media and entertainment since the camera was first invented (some of the earliest photographs in existence were of nude women, and not necessarily in an artistic fashion).

The thing is that while this is known to be true, the entertainment industry doesn't talk about it much for obvious reasons. Not too many consumers want to think about the fact that the interactive game their kids are playing on their animated Blu-Rays were first invented, tested, and proved successful with adult content.

Mayur Dhaka: Just curious, did you write about it on your resume?

No, and it wasn't necessary. The parent company I worked for (they owned a number of properties, of which this website was only one...I worked on several projects, including PG ones as well) was technically an online advertising firm, so the name of the business wasn't a red flag. And all I focused on in my resume were my skills and responsibilities, rather than the content I worked with. My present-day resume is built much the same way...many employers don't care as much about what IP you worked on as much as what you can do with theirs.

I've never shied away from it in interviews when it was appropriate and I felt comfortable, because I've decided that it's nothing to be ashamed of. It was just an entry-level job, after all. But given the amount of stigma around the industry, it's understandable that I wouldn't want that to be my first impression on paper.

Although, given this day and age when recruiters are more likely to Google an applicant than call them in for an interview, I'm wondering if I should regret that I didn't answer this question anonymously. I certainly didn't expect this to get more votes than any of my other answers here on Quora. :) [EDIT: I have since made this answer anonymous.]

Johan Sundström: After changing jobs, did you ever do anything to resensitize and humanize your relation with sexuality (or however you would categorize the impacted part of your perceptions about things) — human awareness institute workshops, spiritual retreats or similar, and if so, what felt the most valuable to you?

That's a good question, because it makes me realize something really interesting: I did feel rather desensitized by it, as I said. But I wasn't dehumanized; rather, it was the opposite. I saw more humanity watching those films non-stop for eight hours a day, five days a week than I have ever seen in such a condensed timeframe since. Even some bold documentaries I've watched haven't held the same amount of raw humanity that I saw in most of those movies.

I should probably explain more fully...first, to answer your question:

As I mentioned, watching such intense content doesn't just get old. After a year of it, I was depressed and physically ill at the thought of coming into work. I needed a way out, so I saved up enough money to quit, even before I had found another job. I just needed to get away.

I don't attribute this all to the content itself though. Part of it was my disillusionment about the adult world in general (not "adult" as in porn, "adult" as in my first real job out of college). It was my first experience at a full-time job, my first time working through summers, I was paid less than my University implied I would earn with my degree, and I wasn't doing the work I had trained to do. For a completely naive girl fresh with hope, inexperience, and assumptions...you couldn't have asked for a harsher wakeup call at an entry-level job. I felt a little betrayed, a little stupid, and more than a little disillusioned by the whole idea of a "career." That was all on top of porn invading my subconscious...in my dreams, when I closed my eyes, when I was trying to concentrate on other things like hanging out with friends. Just as you may take a project at work home with you; think about it, mull it over, dream about it...so I did with the material I watched all day, every day.

There were a few things that helped me get over that slump. The first was simply time...a few months of not watching that stuff all the time let my head clear. I felt 10x lighter once it had worked itself out.

The second was to make a conscious decision that I would use this as a learning experience, rather than a part of my life that I'd rather forget. Just as I answered in another Quora question, (link redacted), I chose to take what I learned from working there and apply it to my future career. I chose to see it in a positive, rather than a negative, light. It's amazing how much better you can make your life when you choose to think of your difficult experiences as good rather than bad.

Third was to rediscover sexuality in my own way. One good thing those films taught me is that sexuality and desire come in many forms, and that each is valuable, no matter how odd - or even gross - it may seem to me. It also taught me that there should be no shame in what you find attractive...rather, that you should celebrate it.

That sort of leads into my point about the humanity in porn...if ever there was a great equalizer, perhaps it is human sexuality. Aside from pure and unstaged violence (which I've had the fortune not to view), I can't think of anything that is more raw and basely human than people engaging in consensual, sexual acts.

This may sound ironic given the stereotype that most people think of: women with perfect hair, plastic surgery, and more makeup than skin, who were obviously hired for abilities other than acting. And of course there's the men with perfect muscles, no body hair, and faces that are cropped out of the frame so that they can be anyone...a blank canvas on which to project oneself. There doesn't seem to be much raw truth in that.

The thing is, these types of films are popular and well-known, but they make up only about 10% of the overall content at a site like the one I worked for. It may even be closer to 5%. Remember I said that we had to watch it all - amateur, alternative, and films that were "off the beaten track," so to speak. Those glossy hetero-normative films are the most well-known because they are the idea of what is normal and acceptable in this country, as far as sexuality goes. ("If you're going to do something as taboo as watch people having sex, then it should be Caucasian hetero sex between thin, perfect-looking young people with all of their limbs.") But just like most culturally acceptable things in this country, it happens to be in the minority.

I saw things that opened my eyes to parts of human nature I never even thought about. I watched films where there was no nudity, no intercourse, nothing but fully clothed women in a field, acting like waitresses for one another and having tennis matches...and yet it was strangely sensual.

I saw people of all shapes, sizes, ages (18+), races, sexual orientations, self-identities, and defects. I guarantee you that there is no other entertainment genre on Earth that is as inclusive as adult films. There is a role for anyone.

Once I saw a girl with whom I graduated high school in a starring role, which made me think about my friends, my neighbors, and my community very differently.

I began to understand other parts of the world by seeing what kind of films they produced...both what was popular and acceptable there, and what was banned but produced there anyway with great enthusiasm. I understood how Brazil views transsexuals before I ever learned that they speak Portuguese (both of which I learned at this job, by the way). I won't mention what I learned about Japan.

I learned that relationships of a different kind than my own aren't to be looked down upon. As an example, I was fairly naive about homosexuality. What I did know, based on the poorly informed opinions of my former classmates in middle and high school, was that homosexuals were deviants and perverts (as I said, stupid and naive). So naturally, I had some anxiety about watching such films, expecting them to be harsh and disturbing. But what I saw completely blew my mind: compared to the hetero films I saw, where women were routinely used as objects, the partners in gay films were far and away more loving, caring, and considerate of one another - as if they really cared. These films seemed like lovemaking, rather than carnal needs being met. The difference was striking, and completely changed my view of homosexual relationships.

I saw films that...well, I won't describe them here because this is a PG site. I've gotten too close to the line already...hopefully I haven't crossed it. (That happens sometimes after having gone through this experience - I get to talking about it, and I forget that not everyone is as comfortable with it as I've become.) But suffice it to say that I learned pornography is not always about sex - more often it's about pleasure, and the definition of pleasure covers a wide range indeed.

I'm rambling now, and have more than answered your question. But it brings me to some conclusions I wish to share. These are the worldly things that I learned while watching porn for eight hours a day, five days a week, for a year:

• To be tolerant of others. When you're forced to view acts that you're taught are deplorable, you begin to see the humanity in them. You begin to see the humans behind them. You learn to accept that the points of view which differ from your own are valid, even though you may still disagree with them.
• That everyone deserves a chance. It doesn't matter how old, fat, scarred, or inexperienced they are...it doesn't matter where they're from, what race they are, or what they were or were not born with. Anyone can be very talented if you just give them a chance to show it.
• That the people dominating a situation aren't necessarily the ones in control. Often the people who try to look like they're in charge are actually the ones with the least amount of influence.
• That it's possible to be feminine and womanly without sacrificing any power.

These are the lessons I learned which, I would like to think, have made me a better human. So I can't rightly say that I have ever wanted to "recover" from this experience, and go back to being who I was beforehand. Who I am now is too valuable.

Confessions of a former investment banker - I worked on several multi-billion transactions and this is what I've learned:

• 'Investment' banking has little to do with investments. Your primary job is to advise corporations on equity/debt issuance and mergers & acquisitions. Heck, that's not even true, you are really a 'salesman', and your primary job is to maintain a relationship with corporations and convince them to hire you on financing and M&A activities.
• Being a banker from Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley (or any bulge bracket bank) doesn't mean you know what's really going on in the markets or finance. You are just a cog in the wheel.
• Investment bankers advise CEOs/CFOs on major corporate transactions on the premise that they are financial experts in the industries (tech, industrials, consumer, etc.). However, most of them are quite clueless about their own company/industry. Ask your Goldman Sachs investment banking buddy what's going on with Goldman Sachs. Try it! If they are honest, they will tell you they don't have a clue.
• Heck, most investment bankers are not that capable of managing their own money. What they do with their own money is often very different from the advice they give others.
• While presentation and advice appear sophisticated and precise, you really don't want to see how the sausage was made. Opinions range from educated guesses to made-up-stuff frequently masquerade as facts and well-researched advice. I've seen and performed my fair share of number fudging/massaging to justify a conclusion.
• Reality is you will say anything to get a deal done. I once worked on advising a client on acquiring a business which eventually got done. A few years later, I advised the same client to divest the business. You can always find some way to justify a deal.
• If you are a junior investment banker, you spend most of your time putting together powerpoint presentations/memos. And even more time making sure they look *pretty*. Junior bankers are the king of powerpoint/excel/word combo!
• At the junior level, your workweek easily averages 80+hr/wk. During crunch time, it is not uncommon to work 120+hr/wk. That's 17+hr days, for 7 days a week! Sad thing is, most of that time is wasted on unproductive, wheel spinning tasks. (sidetracking a little here, but why so many ivy-league students want to go into investment banking is quite interesting, I have my own explanation here: Henry Wong's answer to Why do Harvard undergraduates head to Wall Street?) (you may also want to see: Henry Wong's answer to Why do investment bankers need to work long hours? Can't some of the modeling work be outsourced?)
• Which brings me to my next point, investment bankers are pretty bad project/people managers. The working hours I mentioned above could be cut in half if someone slightly higher up just managed a little better. Some people justify this as a hazing ritual.
• Confidential and private information are rarely treated as such. People can't help talking about what they are working on.
• Most bankers know they are generally overpaid. But every banker thinks they are underpaid compared to other bankers. It is all relative.
• It is a culture of greed and envy. Envy being the more toxic one, in my opinion.
• The above is common knowledge to most seasoned investment bankers. They just accept it as is after some time.

On the topic of Wall Street in general, you may care to read: Henry Wong's answer to What are some mind-blowing facts about Wall Street?

--
See also:

• Henry Wong's answer to Why do investment bankers need to work long hours? Can't some of the modeling work be outsourced?
• Henry Wong's answer to Why do Harvard undergraduates head to Wall Street?
• Henry Wong's answer to What are some mind-blowing facts about Wall Street?

Education in the United States:

There are more incentives to be a coach who has to take a job as a teacher, than there is for a teacher to have to take a job as a coach.

What this means is that many educators today didn’t join the profession for a love of the subject they teach or a desire to educate children in subjects they will actually use later on in life.

An alarming percentage of your child’s teachers are really little more than failed athletes who believe that coaching is their way into ESPN after they discovered that merely believing in themselves wasn’t enough to compete with the genetic lottery winners who play professional sports. This is exacerbated by the extraordinary amount of money paid to college level coaches and the dream of coaching their favorite professional team to a championship victory, which has to start somewhere.

To achieve this dream many, not all, take the route of becoming coaches, which requires in most places that they also teach a subject (unlike the college level coaches they wish to become). History and Social Studies is often saved for these individuals as it is rarely a tested subject, and might help explain so many students fail to understand basics to Civic subjects and are sucked in by questionable philosophies in college. Other times, the subject they teach is something like “Health”, which is a throw away class for students who honestly don’t want to learn things in harder classes. The coach is then freed to focus on his sports career and gives minimal attention to his classroom.

Despite many coaches who are excellent motivators, their passion simply isn’t the classroom, where their efforts are most greatly needed. Despite the self-serving rhetoric many coaches tell their players, just trying hard won’t help you reach the pros. You exerting your energy on the field rather than in class or focusing on goals which are both worthy and attainable will, however, help their win/loss record, which is all far too many of them care about anyway.

To be sure, there are great teachers who are coaches. I have patterned my teaching style after one such coach, and as a Marine, I have a firm appreciation for physical health and fitness, but you would be disturbed how many public school teachers slip through the cracks in that they will be fired if they don’t win games, but not if they produce substandard students.

A few from the aviation field...

Black boxes aren't black
It makes sense; you want to find this box amongst what will usually be charred wreckage.

Aircraft tend not to explode before crashing
Aviation accident investigators find that if there are eyewitnesses to an aircraft crash, they nearly always report having seen an explosion or fire immediately before the aircraft hit the ground. After comprehensive investigation, it's nearly always found that there wasn't any explosion or fire. (My personal theory is that it's possibly due to the small time lapse between seeing and hearing the impact confusing our minds.)

High-speed or high-angle aircraft accidents don't leave large debris
Many crashes occur at take-off and landing - the most dangerous phases of flight - and are thus low-speed, low-angle incidents. Even very severe incidents during these phases usually end up looking "recognisably plane-like":

Incidents from altitude and/or at high speed and/or at an acute angle, however, tend to look far more like this:

(Which is why conspiracy theorists re 9/11 Flight 93 debris don't have a valid point with regard to "lack of debris"; you wouldn't expect any significantly-sized debris, except perhaps the engines.)

Aircraft documentation is incredibly voluminous
The amount of documentation associated with every aircraft - descriptions of what the aircraft is, how to repair it, emergency procedures, etc - are phenomenally extensive. Each aircraft type would be delivered to purchasers accompanied by hundreds of thousands of pages of technical documentation.

Configuration management is phenomenally meticulous
For each individual aircraft, a "type record" is maintained, which describes in minute detail exactly what state every aircraft in the fleet is in. Every time a part is replaced, it's recorded. But even in a fleet of "identical" aircraft, there will be tiny differences. For example, a particular wire - and every single wire is identified, described, and labelled, and its exact routing minutely described - might be of a different type in some of the fleet than in others, as older type wires are changed to newer ones as they cycle through maintenance. Every single difference is meticulously recorded.

As an example of the scale of the documentation, when Australia retired its relatively small fleet of less than 30 F-111 aircraft, here is the documentation that was archived:

Pilot error doesn't mean "bad pilot"
Nearly all aircraft crashes are attributed at least in part to "pilot error", usually amongst numerous other factors. Particularly if the pilot has been killed, families can find this very difficult to accept, and feel that their deceased family member is being "blamed" or disrespected. People in the aviation field know and accept that everybody makes errors; systems are supposed to be designed to be robust enough to withstand human errors within the normal range, eg fatigue, inattention, forgetfulness, etc. Aircraft investigations are - rightly - uncompromising in identifying the causes, and "pilot error" will nearly always be one of the contributors, even if only a minor contributor. That doesn't mean that the pilot was a bad pilot, or even that they had a bad day. It means that their particular oversight wasn't one that they got away with on that particular occasion, usually because of a combination of other systemic issues. Identifying "pilot error" as a contributor is not intended to "blame" the pilot, but to allow for identification of design or procedural changes that will allow the system to tolerate this kind of error in future.

Before and After Special Effects from Various Notable Scenes

I don't personally work in the movie industry, but i came across this and it's quite fascinating. Special effects are not just for crazy graphics and science fiction movies. In fact, it maybe used in most scenes we see in television/movies. Here are a few before and after shots.

Source : Before and After Special Effects from Various Notable Scenes

I work in an Emergency Room. Most people who come to the Emergency Room have a legitimate reason for being there. There are a few whose visits have nefarious intentions.

Emergency personnel call them “Drug Seekers” and they are easily identified through behavior and frequent visits. Because of the ongoing prescription drug problem in the US, there is a database that can be accessed and all prescriptions written and filled by a patient can be visualized. These State Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs are utilized in 37 states.

Drug seekers are exposed within minutes of checking in to the Emergency Room. The physician knows when your last prescription was, who wrote it, who filled it and how many pills you got.

Most people believe that their medical history is protected and that such a database would be illegal. It is not illegal, and a physician is authorized to view a patient’s medical history. See: The National Alliance for Model State Drug Laws (NAMSDL)

Big Brother is watching every Percocet you take.

Batteries are following Moore's law

The installed price of lithium ion batteries is dropping in half every 18 months and they last twice as long ... just like Moore's law for computer chips...
well not quite Moore's law but something very similar.

I've worked for a handful of lithium ion battery-using companies in electric transportation and grid storage where the price is now down to about $500/kWh to purchase. The price has declined like this in the past few years
(not official company info but mine):

You can decide for yourself how how many data points that you need to see where the industry is trending and (much more importantly) if the trend is sustainable. [Edit: got a quote in mid-June of 2013 at $350/kWh. While that's a little bit above that curve, we haven't negotiated yet either.] [Edit2 2013-08-19: I understand that Tesla is buying it's 80kWh packs at $150/kWh or $12,000, which if true is WAY under that curve...so it might not yet be sustainable today but continues the trend until they are sustainable by possibly late next year(?).]

An implication:

An electric sedan gets about 4 miles for each kWh. So 100 kWh of max storage capacity in 2017 would give a 400 mile range with (today's) capability of a 15 minute charge time for about $10,000 (unlike about $30k or more today).
So, keeping in mind that $0.20 per mile of gas is $0.03 per mile of electricity,
in 7-10 years from now there won't be a reason to have a gas car.

(assuming there are enough places to charge it).
See Tesla's Supercharger plans:

Tesla unveils its planned nationwide Supercharger network
[place the usual legal mumbo-jumbo about not representing my employer here]

edit: As of 2016–05–31, we can get battery energy storage systems for around $150/kWh so the trend seems to be holding. The technology around those prices is not always lithium ion however and can be other types, such as flow batteries (which tend to last, effectively, forever).

edit 2017–11–29: batteries (lithium ion, specifically) is about $125 per kWh now and they should last 10+ years; so the original curve still seems to be on track, although scale seems to really matter. It’s fairly difficult to get small quantities at these prices, which would suggest a high transaction cost being supported by the manufacturers.

I'll answer this for my last job (nurse on a forensic unit of the state psychiatric hospital) and for my job now (nurse on a substance abuse floor of a Veteran's hospital).

Forensic unit-

• I was blown away when I found out that some of my sickest patients were found competent to stand trial. Most of us are unaware of what it entails to be competent to stand trial. All that means is that they know what a prosecutor/defense lawyer's job is, a judge's job is, some seriously generic pieces of how the legal system works. That's IT. It has nothing to do with how sick they are.
• Getting out of the legal stuff, people are always amazed that we generally felt pretty safe there. Yes, we worked with mentally ill murderers, rapist, arsonists, child molesters, etc. And something that most people don't understand is that though ALL of my patients were criminals, my unit was not built like a jail. We had 7 bedrooms for 23 men. They all had a bed, a dresser, and a locker (that didn't have a lock). The men were generally free to roam around the unit as they wished. No handcuffs, no bars, no tasers, nothing like that. We relied on our psych training and the back up of other workers to keep us safe. It usually works.
• Psych hospitals are nothing like you see on TV.
• If a patient is found Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity there is no given limit on how long they stay at the hospital. Regardless of their crime, no matter how heinous it is, if they behave, take their medications as ordered, and follow their program, they can (and do) get out. Sometimes they are released with supervision. Sometimes not. I think if our society knew how many were released back into your cities they'd SHIT.
• Mental illness can creep up on ANYONE. We had doctors, lawyers, electrical engineers, etc there. No one is safe from mental illness.
• The hospital prides itself on being as restraint-free as possible. That meant no restraints unless every other tactic hadn't worked. They even call medications restraints.

Substance abuse program-

• My patients quit every kind of drug known. The hardest drug for them to quit is nicotine. Smoking.
• I'm always floored when I learn that my patients spent $400 a day or more on a habit.
• I'm even more dumbfounded when I learn how they got $400 a day or more to keep up with their habit. (A few examples- Crawled up through the attic and down into his grandmothers closet to steal $15,000 out of a purse hidden. Another prostituted his wife. A lot of them will steal from stores and sell what they've stolen. One just left that would walk in to somewhere like Walmart or Target, grab a microwave or vacuum cleaner, and walk right out the doors, without fear.)
• Veteran's court. Sounds scary, doesn't it? Most of my veterans end up finding Veteran's court to be their best friend. What would have been a serious offense in the outside becomes little to nothing in veteran's court. *Wish I could use it! Veterans' court link.

That's about all I can think of now. I know there are more but I've worked in it so long they seem commonplace now. I'll add to it if I think of any.

Thanks for the A2A.

I worked in a Congressional office on Capitol Hill and I think most people outside of Washington, DC would be surprised how those offices are run.

You have interns who do the grunt work of making copies and such. Same as everywhere.

You have Staff Assistants (and sometimes interns) who answer the phones. People typically call to either make a complaint (why did the Congressman vote this way!? etc) or they want to talk to someone about a legislative issue (what is the Congressman's position on X? etc). If they want to do the second they get passed on to a Legislative Assistant (see below). When people call to complain the Staff Assistant patiently listens and then says "Ok, we'll pass that on to the Congressman." Then, they hang up the phone and go back to their business. If tons and tons of people start calling on a certain issue the Staff Assistant lets everyone else in the office know and the Chief of Staff decides whether a statement should be issued.

You have Legislative Correspondents that respond to all the email and snail mail that come into the office. Form letters have been created on each issue that could come up so when you get an email about gun control, for example, they would just tailor the gun control form letter to send to the constituent.

You then have Legislative Assistants (LA) who do all the research on each bill that is to be voted on. So if you have a bill on reinvesting in NASA, for example, you would have a 26 year old kid (LA's are typically 25 - 28 years old) do research on it to figure out how the Congressman should vote. They then pass that research on to the Legislative Director and the Chief of Staff, who review it and then send the final recommendation on to the Congressman. The LAs are also the ones who meet with people when they stop by the office. People of all stripes stop by to share their concerns ("We are here from X group and we think the Congressman should do Y about issue Z"). The LA listens patiently and once they leave they throw away all the materials the group gave them and they go back to their business.

You have the Communications Director or Press Secretary who does all the social media, website posting, fielding calls from reporters, writing press releases, op-eds, and speeches. There is practically nothing written that comes out of the office that is actually written by the Congressman. I was in a GOP office and the RNC sent us an email everyday with talking points about what was going on in the news. Everything is copied and pasted from there.

The "District Office" is the small office back in the county that the Congressman represents. They get all the ridiculous local stuff. I once had a lady call the DC office to complain about a kid who drove his car into her living room and she wanted the Congressman to do something about it. I had her call the District Office.

The Legislative Director and the Chief of Staff oversee the staff.

Another funny issue is faxes. Every morning the interns go to the fax machine and there are over 200 faxes sitting there. Lots of them are duplicates because non-profits and advocacy firms have figured out how to set their websites up so constituents can fax an office by filling out a form. The intern isn't paid and doesn't really care so he just throws them in a recycle bin never to be looked at again.

When Congress isn't in session the staff still have to come in to work but there isn't much to do. So everyone comes in in jeans and checks Facebook all day. Some offices throw parties with kegs and beer pong.

There you have it. This was just my experience but I'm pretty sure it's the same in most offices.

Don't know that it would be mind-blowing, but given Hollywood's depiction of this, it may be for some:

Tracing a call to the originator does NOT take any amount of time. The phone company switches know who called whom and when at all times. It is very important for billing purposes. What you see in the movies with the police telling the victims to keep the bad guy on the phone long enough to trace the call is simply baloney. When someone is the victim of extortion and law enforcement is involved, their numbers are put in a special state and every call is immediately traced and reported to the police.

Some caveats:

Public phones in the US used to have numbers that you could call (maybe they still do). Those numbers were not necessarily different from regular business or home phone numbers. A call could be traced but figuring out whether it was a public phone or not and where it was located was tricky for some local phone companies.

Cell phones are a nightmare for the same reason. The US does not have a particular set of numbers dedicated exclusively to this service. However, databases are maintained with this information and today's computers are fast enough that results can be obtained almost instantaneously. Now, location may be a slightly different issue, but still, if you use your cellphone or even just carry it while turned on, the police may be able to get a fairly good idea of where you are. This latter capability is actually exaggerated in some movies, but it does exist.

I was a professional poker player for three years. I spent about 70% of my time playing online, with about 30% reserved for live tournaments (think WSOP, WPT, EPT, etc.) and cash games. These are some of the things I noticed that people find most interesting (note: these are just my observations):

Most live poker players have no clue what's truly going on at the table
This is a function of the evolution of poker. Back in the day, it took people years to acquire the same experience that it now takes months online.

Think about it like this: in live poker, one can only play 1 table at a time. Now a great live dealer might deal 20 hands/hour. That means if you play 10 hours a day, you've played 200 hands. If you play 300 days/year, that's 60,000 hands. Meanwhile, some online players can play somewhere between 10-20 tables at one time. Let's say an online player plays 10 tables at a time, at an average rate of 100 hands/hr/table.That's 1,000 hands/hour, 10,000 hands/day and 3,000,000 hands/year. It's not even close.*

NL Holdem' isn't a solved game, but online players have broken down the game to the minutia. There are great forums (2+2, Pocketfives, etc.) that give online players the ability the discuss any decision. There are awesome video sites (Card Runners, Leggo Poker, Run It Once, etc.) that give online players the ability to watch some of the best players play and discuss strategy in real-time. And online players can share hand histories via chat platforms to discuss small tweaks in strategy.

As a corollary, most "celebrity" poker players are relatively bad at poker
Most of the live players just didn't evolve with the game. Their fundamentals are considered "bad" and while they may have a great feel for the game, they make mathematically bankrupt decisions time-and-time again.

Phil Hellmuth is the poster child for this. He has won the most amount of bracelets, but his fundamentals (mathematically) are atrocious. The reason he wins: he gets people to punt stacks to him more than almost any other player because he is Phil Hellmuth and it's awesome to bluff him so you can tell your friends back home.

Most tournament poker players are "backed"
Most of the guys you see on TV are "horses," backed by other players. Typically backing deals are 50-50 but include make-up, which means that if you win a tournament for $1M, but your backer has put you in $500,000 of tournaments without a payout, the $500,000 comes out of the winnings (and gets paid back to the backer) before you split the profits. Then the cycle starts all over again.

What this means is that most tournament players do not have 100% of themselves in any tournament. Even the ones who back themselves swap percentages with other players to defend against variance.

The other product from this is that most players are playing from behind. Backing creates a vicious cycle; the only way to get out is to win a big tournament. So, you get people who are dead broke (because they haven't been paid out in forever) playing in high buy-in events chasing a big score. It's a recipe for disaster.

Most poker players are not John Nash
Most poker players do not see numbers floating around when they are making decisions. They know the math, but most are not going to recite 50+ digits of pi for you. Instead, they are doing quick multiples and fractions in their head. How much should you bet? It's a multiple of the blind or the last bet or a fraction of the pot or the last bet. Then, it's an understanding of pot-to-stack and what the sizing will be on later streets.

It doesn't take anything more than a buy-in to enter into most live tournaments
Want to play in the World Series of Poker Main Event? All it takes is $10K. It's not that special to play in live events. All you have to do is pony up the dough.

Many online players like to play while on drugs
The drug of choice is usually weed. Online players say it calms their nerves, especially when they are playing a whole host of tables. They also look to smoke when they play live because they are so used to it.**

I will try to think of more - these are just the first that come to my mind.

*note: I may have over-estimated here. Most online players are playing 60-80 hands/hour, not 100. Most probably play 5 hours/day and most play more like 5 tables/time. Still that's 1,750 hands/day x 300 days = 525,000 hands/year. The numbers are still grossly different between live and online. And I doubt most live players are getting in 10 hours a day for 300 days.
**I've taken some heat over this, so I softened the language to be less absolute. I stand by my comment.

I worked at a service station (fuel servo, gas station) for many years whilst studying. You can learn a lot about people by selling dangerous fuels to the general public.

With servos in Australia, the servo guy can stop the pumps (ie shut off fuel flowing to the pumps) and talk to his customers over a loudspeaker, all from his counter in the shop. It is surprising how many times you need to do this.

A lot of people are very mindless when they stop for fuel. You would be appalled at how many times I had to stop the pumps because people would start filling their cars whilst smoking a cigarette. Mind boggling. You are standing on top of 50,000 litres of flammable fuel, but you gotta have your Marlborough!

The actual liquid fuel does not catch fire, it is the vapour. Fuel vapour pours off the liquid fuel and down towards the ground (it is more dense, so heavier than air), so next time you are filling your car keep in mind that you are standing in a cloud of volatile vapour that surrounds you.

That's why I had to stop people from filling up buckets with fuel. Buckets. Open container = vapour everywhere = danger.

The same applies to filling a fuel container/jerry can whilst the container is inside the boot of your car. Stop the pumps. “Take the container out of the boot and place it on the ground before filling it.” Otherwise you are filling the entire inside of your car and boot with flammable fumes.

Guys on motorbikes would get very annoyed when I stopped the pumps and asked them to get off their bikes in order to fill up (most would pull up to the pump, grab the nozzle, unclip the tank and start filling). The reason is – you have a bike with a lot of hot parts being filled with fuel and flammable vapour is pouring out all over the bike. If it catches fire when you are sitting on the bike, what’s the first thing you’re going to do? Jump of the bike! If you tip it over you then have a tank full of ignited fuel pouring onto the forecourt – not good for business.

No. I cannot let you put fuel into a Gatorade bottle because you ran out half a kilometre down the road. Has to be a specific ‘fuel carrying vessel’ like a jerry can.

Diesel is a much less volatile fuel than unleaded. If you had a small dish of diesel, you couldn’t light the vapour with a match or a lighter. Or if it lit, it would go out (this depends on the ambient temperature). If the ground is very hot it may stay ignited.

So next time you fill up, take a look around for your nearest fire extinguisher (they are red, and if needed you have to pull the plastic maintenance tag from the top, pull the pin out of the handle, aim the nozzle at the base of the fire, squeeze the handle/trigger, then sweep the spray left to right at the base of the flames) be mindful, and have a safe trip!

When I first started attending film school, I found these things astounding. Of course, I grew up in the midwest with very little exposure to the industry.

No one actually says "Lights, Camera, Action". This is a hold over from when film was much less sensitive, and it was costly/dangerous to leave studio lights on for long periods of time. Also notice that there's nothing in there about sound. What they actually say is more like this: "Quiet please! Ready? Roll sound..." (someone says "Sound speed", then someone else says the name of the shot and take, eg "Scene 21-Echo, take 2") "...Roll camera..." (someone else says "Camera speed", someone else says "Mark" and claps the slate) "...Action!" Also, depending on the set/director, most of this may be said by the 1st assistant director.

Related to that, no one ever, EVER says "check the gate, we're moving on". The reason for this is that, if it is a bad gate (meaning that a small hair or shred of celluloid got stuck between the film and the lens), they have to reshoot the scene since that take would be unusable.

Everything, and I mean everything has a special name on set. Extension cords are "stingers", food is "crafty", tape is "gaff" (I should point out that "Gaff" is actually a specific brand of tape, but rarely is any other type of tape used on set), and actors are "talent".

Set teachers aren't just there to teach. They are responsible for making sure that the crew follows all of the nit-picky rules for working with minors on set. Depending on the age of the child actor, the set teacher can even require that certain lights must be turned off because they're too bright.

Most things that film theory teachers would have you believe are intentional and symbolic are actually accidental or not thought out. A great example of this is the scene from "In Cold Blood" where rain on a window is projecting on an actors face and making it look like he's crying. This was a total accident.

The vast majority of the time spent on making a film is not spent on the filming, or even the post-production. It is the pre-production, starts with a bunch of people getting together and saying "Let's make a movie!" and ends the night before the first day of shooting. This process can take years, or even decades. The script for "John Carter" was floating around Disney way back in the early nineties.

It's really not that unusual for a large film to shoot first, and get a permit to film later.

I've filmed with everything from a Sony DV Handycam to 35mm black and white stock to a RED Scarlet. While the quality of the camera certainly makes a difference in the quality of the footage, a well-lit and carefully thought-through scene from a $500 camera can look wayyyy better than a shot from a $50,000 camera pointed at something poorly lit and lacking composition.

Green / Blue screen almost always causes more problems than it solves. Mainly because of the film "Forrest Gump", people think that if you wrap something in green cloth, it just magically disappears. It doesn't work like that. Even worse, very few directors have a good understanding of how visual effects work, and all too often assume that someone can just "fix it in post".

Directors rarely wear a light meter around their neck. Light meters are usually handled by the director of photography or the gaffer, or the best boy electric.

When you go to the theater (assuming that it is not a digital theater), you're not actually seeing 24 frames per second. Most people can detect flickering at that frame rate, so each frame is projected twice, making it 48 frames per second.

Most people tout digital as being a lossless format that doesn't degrade when you make copies. This is only partly accurate. Each time a digital video file is transcoded from one codec to another, some data is lost. From camera to editing to visual effects to color correction to final output, digital footage ends up being transcoded up to four times, each time losing a small amount of quality.

When you go to the theater, you'd expect to see something in a ridiculously high resolution. If it is a digital theater, what you are actually seeing is almost certainly 2K resolution, which is only about 15% higher resolution than the 1080p flatscreen in your living room.

MOS, a term used to denote shooting something without audio, does NOT actually stand for "Mit out sound". This is a cute story that audio people like to tell each other, but is almost certainly false.

THX is not a format for audio, neither is it a type of audio system. It actually is a standards system used for certifying a sound setup (ie the placement of the speakers, etc.). When you see the THX logo at the start of a movie on DVD, all it means is that the movie's audio was mixed on a mixing stage with the THX certification. When you see a movie at the theater, and the theater promotes the movie as THX, there's actually no guarantee that it really is. Because the certification process is expensive, most theaters only have one or two screens that are THX certified, and since the same print of a film is usually used on multiple screens, there's a decent chance that the screen you're watching it in isn't the one with the THX cert. What's more, theaters have to pay an annual fee to use the THX logo, so a theater that meets THX certification may not advertise it if they don't want to pay for the right to use the THX logo.

While a film set is a very busy place, most of the crew spend more than 50% of their time waiting around, doing nothing. Most scenes take place in smallish rooms, so each department must wait for the previous department to finish before they can do their job, i.e. while the art department is dressing the set, the grip and electrics department are waiting to set up lights, and after them comes the camera department, the director and the actors for rehearsal, and usually the art department again to fix whatever the other departments messed up. The sound team is just kind of expected to sneak in there whenever they can. For some reason, no one really likes the sound department.

A surprising amount of dialog that you hear in a movie was re-recorded after the film was done shooting. On a romantic comedy, it is around 40% of the dialog. On an action/adventure movie, it is between 60% and 80% that is re-recorded. On a film like Transformers, it is probably between 90% and 95%. All other sounds, including footsteps, clothing rustles, cars, background babble (called walla), background music in a restaurant or business, and general ambient sounds like city noise or jungle noise are recorded separately and added in to the mix during post-production. The on-set sound team's only goal is to get dialog and nothing else.

Most film studios aren't located in Hollywood anymore.

Film (celluloid) is not dead. Yet.

Once a camera starts rolling, the zoom is never adjusted. Most lenses don't even let you adjust the zoom. Next time you watch a movie, try to find a place where the camera zooms (not to be confused with the camera physically moving forward or backward). Chances are you won't see one.

The best film makers in the world aren't in Hollywood. They're in film schools, on Vimeo and Youtube, at independent festivals, or that teenager down the street. In five to ten years, I predict that the quality of films you see in theaters (if they still exist) will be ten times better than what you're seeing now.

I used to work in a consumer goods company that sells products to buyers at retailers.

The things that surprised me:

1. The display looks really full but is only 2 rows in
Obviously it looks full because this gives the impression of abundance. This looks better and customers are likely to pick up a product if the display looks pretty. More importantly, we are afraid of selling too much stock to the retailer and/or the retailer is afraid of being too aggressive and buying too much stock (your manager will say, "Why doesn't the retailer have faith in our product? This is your fault."). If there is stock leftover long after the promotion is over, our sales suffer over the next few months as we try to purge this overstock.

(via Coroflot — Design Jobs & Portfolios)

2. Displays at stores give you crazy paper cuts and take a crazy amount of time to set up
This particular section/shelf at the store in the picture above is called an endcap. This is a smaller display. Sometimes, promotional displays can span the entire length of the stores. Whatever the case may be, all promotional displays are set-up by people. And sometimes, when there's a major promotion, these people are setting up the displays the night before it begins until 4am in the morning just so a consumer like you will willingly take out your wallet and buy, buy, buy. I didn't have to do this often, but I have a ton of respect for the merchandisers who are running about every day making sure the products are stocked, in the right place, at the right time.

3. There is a good customer and there's a grouchy one
We get customers who don't know how to use the product, claim another product is better, or claim that our product doesn't work well. Whatever it is, if you're nicer to us when you complain, you're going to get nicer/newer samples than Mr. Grouchy down the street.

4. Placement of product is king
Competitor's product placed at eye level and yours is on the bottom shelf? You're in trouble. If your manager happens to walk into that store and sees this, prepare to come into work the next morning accompanied by a long lecture (that is, if he/she didn't already text you a picture of the poorly placed product along with the text "why are we placed below [insert competitor brand name]?" Any product not placed at an optimal position? Then it's your fault because you've failed to maintain a good relationship with the store manager/buyer or you didn't plan your promotional budget well enough to secure the best space.

5. Planogramming down to the mm (millimeter)
There's a lot of work that goes into planogramming merchandise -- how can you optimize the space allocated to you when you have X SKUs to merchandise? I spent many days and nights optimizing each store's planogram, forecasting the number of turns (the number of times each row I've stocked will be bought up completely by customers, requiring replenishment as an empty row is just wasted money) for each row of product. More facings go to products that sell well (i.e. 5 facings for the ketchup on the middle section bottom row) and fewer facings for the not-so-popular items. This is very simplistic, of course. We also need to take into consideration factors such as the size of the item and whether it'd be better off being placed somewhere else for cross-merchandising (i.e. display ketchup near hotdog buns).

Today, when I go shopping and put a product in my basket only to decide that I don't want it anymore, I walk right back to the shelf that I took it from and place it back as neatly as possible. I didn't use to do that prior to working in the retail industry.

Librarian here.

• Your public library costs each household an average of $12 per $100,000 of property value a year, yet provides many more times that amount in FREE loaned materials.
• "Everything is on the web" is a laughable lie. Especially when it's followed by "...so libraries are irrelevant." Even if everything was online, most people would do a very poor job of finding what they were looking for. Which leads me to...
• You probably suck at finding information, even on Google. ESPECIALLY on Google, most likely. That's OK, though, because...
• Most people who work in libraries in the USA are not volunteers, and we don't just read books all day. Most people who staff library reference desks, in fact, have master's degrees in library/information science. The rest have at least a bachelor's degree, many with some coursework in library/information science.
• Most high-quality information is not easily accessible on the free internet, but is found on fee-based databases and websites. Librarians are trained to navigate those resources--just ask!

I work for the Korean government, in a propaganda organisation under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. None of this is secretive, but it is (or at least should be) surprising.

K-pop is heavily funded by the Korean government, which considers it a viable way to engage in diplomacy. The budget for promoting K-pop was USD 115 million over four years as reported in 2012, but I think that's gone up as of this year's budget. So, the Korean taxpayer essentially paid to send Girls' Generation to the US to be on the Letterman show, as well as numerous other endeavours.

Psy was not considered K-pop and didn't benefit from government funding until after he started going viral and it was clear he was going to start setting records. Everyone was initially furious that he was the first breakthrough star (first of many, it's still believed), but once it was clear he was only going to keep getting more famous he started receiving all sorts of government support.

So, while you might dismiss American pop music for its low quality, keep in mind that it at least isn't backed by the government.

I talked with a guy outside the software industry today and he was surprised about all of this, so apparently it qualifies.

I work with a couple hundred other people on a pretty well-known piece of software.

Every release has had hundreds of known bugs (as in, we knew about them before we shipped), and probably another hundred unknown bugs (as in, our customers will discover them after we ship).

Writing software is hard, and working on a large product - one that has been growing and morphing for over a decade - is insanely hard. Every change you make has the potential to break something - or hundreds of things. So we employ really smart people to make changes. And they test their changes. And if the change appears risky, they hand it off to another really smart person, who also tests it. And before the change is incorporated into the product, it has to pass tens of thousands of automated tests (a half-dozen servers run for about ten hours to validate a typical change, or a dozen might run for 24 hours for an atypical change). And even after all of that, it's not unusual to later find bugs that were caused by the change - side-effects that weren't predicted and aren't desirable.

So while we're developing, we sort through the bug reports every week and decide which reports are nonsense (this happens more than you might think), which ones are actually the intended behavior (when something change, even if it changes deliberately, people complain), and which are really bugs. Of those that are really bugs, we decide how important they are - how many customers are likely to notice? How unhappy will they be? What are the predicted side-effects, and how will customers feel about those? How much risk is there of unpredictable side-effects? If it "meets the bar," then the bug is assigned to someone. If it doesn't, we ship with it.

In the last several months before a release, the bar gets higher. More bugs get punted to the next release, due to risk or due to a high likelihood that hardly anyone will notice. Fewer bugs get fixed. We do this because we need to stabilize the product - we need to get the rate-of-change low, so that we can spend weeks just testing something that's very much like what we'll ship.

As the bar goes up and the rate-of-change goes down, we spend more and more time looking over the bugs that were postponed, and we ask ourselves the same questions again. Is this bug still worth fixing? Some bugs get resolved as "we are not going to fix this" (unless of course a customer complains - we're always willing to reconsider) and others get assigned to people who will get started on them - but their fixes will be included not in the upcoming release, but in the one after that.

And then we ship.

And then we start incorporating the fixes in that backlog of bugs, and adding the features that we wished we could have already shipped but didn't have time to implement, and the whole process starts over.

This is how things have been done at many software companies for many years.

There's a growing trend of keeping product quality very high all the way through the developement process, so that at any point in time (or at least, once a month) you can ship what you have. I've been agitating for a switch to that model, and I am sure it will happen eventually, because it's the right thing to do.

But even in that model, there will be bugs that don't get fixed, because we will still choose to invest most of our time adding features that customers are begging for, instead of fixing bugs that probably won't get noticed. It's tough to balance those two forces.

If you have 100 bugs that only affect 1 customer in 100, you have a product that is eventually going to annoy 100% of your customers at some point. That makes me sad. But at the same time, I also have no doubt that if we took a year off and fixed a ton of those rarely-encountered bugs, we'd lose market share to a competitor who shipped more cool new features than we did that year. Or maybe even to a competitor who just improved their performance more than we did that year.

Software is hard to get right.

Big software is impossible to get really, completely right.

--

Edited to add something that I initially wrote as a comment, but that sheds some like on how this sort of situation comes to be:

If you're never worked on a large, long-lived project, this might seem odd. But I suspect that the number of people who have left the development team is roughly equal to the number of people who are on the development team today. There are about 200 of us. So lots of us don't yet know exactly what the software does. And more importantly, we don't always know why it does what it does. I've been on this team for 10 years and I'm learning new stuff every week.

There are a lot of things that we don't have automated tests for, because a lot of it was written in an era when most testing was done manually. We actually had a team of people who spend all of their time validating features by hand. That might seem odd if you're new to the industry, but it was perfectly normal in the 1990s.

Automated testing existed back then, and plenty of companies were using it extensively, but plenty of companies weren't using it at all, and ours was somewhere in between. So, there's lots of functionality that doesn't have tests to prove that it hasn't changed. So, you can make a change that passes all tests, and then find out later that something important broke. Maybe days later, maybe months later. We're careful, but it happens.

There's lots of functionality that has tests to prove that it hasn't changed, but it's often a challenge to find out why it was designed to do what it does. Which customers asked for this feature? Do they still want it? Will anyone complain if we change it? If we make it do something better instead? Will customers agree that this new change is an improvement?

Often there are bug numbers in the comments, so you can learn the story behind something in the bug database. But, more often, you have to go find the person who owns that area of the product today (hopefully that area does still have an owner - stable areas sometimes don't) and hope they know the story, or hope they can refer you to the previous owner (and hopefully that person is still on the team, or at least is still at the company, and still remembers).

Some of it is badly designed, but most of it is pretty clean, pretty solid. It's just not documented as well as we'd all like. Tests make pretty good documentation, but only if they include comments about why the software does what it does. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

Sometimes there's written documentation, sometimes there isn't. Or when you do find the documentation, you find that it's out-of-date. It was written when a feature was conceived, but wasn't updated retrospectively after the feature was written, so the documentation was obsolete before the feature even shipped. Or it just wasn't updated after a customer requested a change, so there's no clear explanation for the divergence between the documentation and reality.

If you know of a software project that's over 10 years old, with over 100 developers working on it today, that doesn't have these problems, please share. I'd love to know how these pitfalls were avoided.

(It's easy to imagine solutions, and we've tried plenty over the years... but here we are.)

Public Radio: No one is that eloquent.

The majority of radio interviews (especially public radio) are pre-recorded, edited, tightened to take out "uhs" and "hmmms" and generally cleaned up before they air. Very rarely is a public official or person of interest put on live in news radio except during breaking news (and usually only reporters go live).

This goes for the host as well. All of their breaths and stumbles are edited out to give them that polished, perfect pitch. Also, quite often the host and guest are not face-to-face, but in studios in different cities.

EDIT ADDED 7/28:

Since this is getting a lot of upvotes, I do want to clarify that hosts do, however, give live reads when a show first airs to transition between the edited reporter pieces and interviews. I did not mean to give the impression that absolutely no public radio is live.

But often the version of a show you hear on your home member station, if it is not being aired directly from the first, live airing, is a second or third feed that has been cleaned up and corrected.

I’ve dipped my toes in several industries and had my mind blown a few times. Here are the top moments:

from law:

• prosecutor bantering with public defender for 30 seconds, laughing, letting the young guy off with a slap on a wrist. His offense? assaulting police officer while on probation for carrying weapons.
• discovering a formula for assessing human life. It’s basically = life expectancy x projected annual income. Plus some additional amount for sympathy factor. So, a young dentist rendered quadriplegic from a skiing accident is worth a lot more than an old grandma hit by a truck while crossing the street. (in worker’s comp, there is even specific math formula for each of your body parts!)

from restaurants:

• some kitchens can be filthy and by that I mean you would never eat there if you have seen what it looks and smells like. (Note: A family-ran Chinese restaurant was actually much cleaner in the back than the major chain - because the owners were always there!)
• most food comes basically pre-cooked. So it gets popped into a microwave and then served. That’s why it tastes like rubber.

from house cleaning:

• many companies, especially smaller ones are not licensed and insured. So if something happens to one of the cleaners at your home, guess who is going to be covering her bills and lost income?
• some people who are cleaning your homes are quite educated and have a professional history: computer scientists, dancers, biology professors, veterinarians, teachers, operations managers, even models and DJ’s. They choose to go into cleaning to spend time with their families, to have flexible schedule to pursue their dream, or simply because they just immigrated.

I worked in a newspaper on the online team as a chief designer. Did you know that all those special websites, info graphics you see online seconds after a important person dies, I mean the old personalities, all those materials are ready months, sometimes even years before. As soon as you realise that some celebrity or important person might "hit the sack" soon all the bio articles start getting written. I prepared a special website for pope John II almost 2 years before his actual death. So when he actualy died, I believe it was a Sunday... I only had to run to work and press a button to put all his special live! It is always a run to see which news media outlet will get all out first!

I work with surveillance and security systems. Some of the technology today is amazing. But, believe it or not, you can't actually do this in real life: