What is a well known 'public secret' in the industry you work in that the majority of outsiders are unaware of?

What's interesting is how humans react to things like progress bars.

I remember designed Google Flights come back with results instantly by spending absurd amounts to pre-compute and cache results long before people requested them. Some of the other flight shopping websites had progress bars that suggested they were doing a deep search for the best possible deals. People trusted the slower website with progress bars more because it seemed like it had worked harder, even though the reality was that it was just slower and less thorough.

The one that pisses me off more than any other is the stupid animations and fake meters that tax software uses. They throw up this animation of a magnifying glass searching through your tax return as if it is actually doing anything. Ugh, it infuriates me so damn much.

I have to submit weekly files to a vendor every Tuesday, but I can't see the vendor-side result until a report generates. They show us a 10 minute timer that I'm positive is just that, an animation. Some days the countdown skips from 9 minutes to Donev every try. Other days the timer hits zero and gets replaced with a "We're still working..." message for another 5-10 minutes.

I'm positive the timer is the vendor's way of forcing people to have at least 10 minutes of patience.

My older teammate reads that timer as gospel and flips their shit the moment it hits zero when really they just needed to give it a couple more minutes. One of their calls I overhear all the time is to the vendor saying "Oh, well it's finished now, after I called you."

Reticulating splines

I do appreciate a progressing animation just so I know it hasn't frozen on me.