What is the worst thing you have heard in a meeting?

I did a huge security audit gig at a stock market in a family-run kingdom. Needless to say, my team had to present the results in front of a prince who was not technical in any way.

Before entering we were told, "You can't mention anything in a negative light. People will lose their jobs and never be able to get a job elsewhere." I was already aware of the requirement to have release letters from previous employers when hoping to take on a job elsewhere, but until then, it hadn't occurred to me how serious and limiting that was.

I had to really pussy foot around the issues (ie: Nobody was doing a bad job, the things that looked bad were super common, they can be fixed in a jiffy, these are all part of the learning experience in this brave new technological world...), and focused heavily on what kinds of things they were reasonably well on the way with.

Otherwise their info security was super lousy. I just wasn't able to say so because of the repercussions for others.

Whilst working as a web developer at a design agency, I suggested using an open source CMS to improve our development speed and quality.

The only reason they rejected the idea was because they wanted to lock their customers into their proprietary CMS.

Whilst at a software company, was told the expectation is to develop bug-free software and that quality engineers should not find bugs.

"We desperately need to hire women and people of color"

No offense, but …