Valid bug reports of mysterious origins? Obviously it had to end up with employees signing NDAs.

The telco I work for relies on its own employees to test new loads for our custom firmwares on cable boxes, modems and phones. Most of that happens on the clock, but it's advantageous to take test devices home too. We get most of the telco's services heavily discounted anyways, but if you opt-in to test new firmwares you'll be provided free hardware that would not be otherwise discounted (currently have 3 free test HD PVRs and 2 modems at home) and turn some of your discounts into freebies. It also let's you into some interesting projects, like [our hyper-wideband tests](https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3tnmui/if_you_wanted_this_internet_install_to_go/). In exchange you're asked to fill surveys and report bugs if you encounter any. It's a no brainer, as even if you ignore the related emails engineering and marketing send now and then, they don't kick you out or even take back free hardware.

While some in the company sign up for these tests and then ignore them, tech support has a real stake in making sure our firmwares aren't horrible, plus nightmares from past experiences and better understanding of the value of decent bug reports. [We've had horrible public rollouts in the past especially for set top boxes](https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/2bon2h/but_stb_engineering_tested_this_firmware_for/) and none of us want to live through that kind of thing again, so we file bugs aggressively. My team, tech senior staff, is especially meticulous even though engineering [doesn't or can't always reciprocate](https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/2bh79k/status_has_been_changed_to_wont_fix/).

Employee testing rules have always been rather informal until a few months ago. Managers all over the company just asked their teams who wanted in, handed over any relevant hardware without ceremony, added your work email address a to a list and that was pretty much it. Since management had no intent to recover test hardware, it was pretty much fire and forget to them. They (usually) reminded us that everything not released to the public is confidential and that we might face disciplinary action if we leaked any information, though. Since as employees our jobs are on the line in theory, that was always good enough, it worked that way without incidents for a couple decades.

Then my boss' phone right behind me rang at work repeatedly on a day he was away, until I got tired of the background noise and looked at his' caller ID. It was the TV technical Product Director, in charge of overseeing STB Engineering among other things, so I picked it up..

> Bytewave: "Boss' stuck in some thing uptown for the day, this is Bytewave. You called him six times?"

> TVPD: "OK. Yeah - bit of a pickle. STB Engineering's been getting multiple bug reports from an unknown source involving confidential firmware updates. CC'ing you about it. Whoever is sending them is doing so through a Gmail address and is not replying to requests for identification. They're valid bugs but I need to know who is sending them in. MAC address provided in their reports is a box issued to your team."

> Bytewave: "Uh, if they're good reports, given how much you usually insist that we file all and any bugs I'm kinda surprised to hear you saying this so nervously."

> TVPD: "For clarity, this may become Legal's problem if we can't identify who is sending this in today. Is there *any* way to get me a name?"

Then I understood - he's worried one of our test boxes with the new OS could be lost in the wind and he just realized our employee testing 'program' has just about no controls whatsoever in place. - A test box with a firmware months away from commercialization could be sold on Ebay and nobody might ever notice. - Then again, anyone doing anything shady with them would certainly not send in detailed bug reports. The format of the email I'm now looking at alone is enough to convince me someone on my team, TSSS, sent it in - why they used Gmail instead of their work email is unclear, but it's a perfectly good report and that's worth something.

> Bytewave: "This was surely sent by one of us, nothing worth bothering Legal with, I'll look into it get back to you ASAP."

Admittedly, employee testing was so loose and laid back that nobody even kept track of which test box was given to whom. Instead of being added to actual billing accounts I could look up in seconds, they are all in white-listed broad 'test accounts' I can't track down easily to a person. Our testing tools did let me point out the specific PMD said cable box was hooked to on our network though, and by then it was trivial to understand who had it in their possession.

Though 'Senior staff' might sound like we're all troubleshooting modems from retirement homes, the name is about seniority rather than age. But we do have a few older techs, including [our most Senior senior, previously featured here as 'Insanity Wolf Colleague'](https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/28qfg6/the_senior_perk/). This great gentleman took his retirement since then, one of this department's first retirees. It suddenly made perfect sense; they never take back test hardware so he still had his test boxes at home and as our work contract guarantee he gets to keep his employee discounts for 10 years. For some reason, he was still filing bugs.

I called him from a test phone to make sure it wasn't recorded and asked why he wasn't, at least, taking credit for his bug reports. I was kinda surprised he cared to do it at all anymore.

> Retired Senior: "Eh I didn't think it would be a big deal, but I didn't reply because I figured, if they know I'm no longer working there they might take this back and I'm kind of missing the work. It's fun to mess around with the test devices, you know? The days can be a little long when you retire, fun to help out. Figured you guys wouldn't mind if a few more reports get filed either."

It hit me a bit how this guy who just recently retired was already bored to the extent he thought it was fun to volunteer his time for a company that quite frankly didn't always treat employees right; despite labor disputes and decades of service, he still cared. And he still had a thought for us, it was touching. He had done absolutely nothing wrong - the confusion only occurred because as a retiree he no longer had access to his work email.

I thought this explanation would be enough to make the whole thing go away. I was going to handle it all on my own but since he asked, our retiree called TVPD back himself and tried to clear up the confusion. We both direly underestimated the red tape involved, though. Management was now overly worried there -wasn't enough- tape surrounding our employee test program because they had trouble tracking down this cable box for a few hours. And so TVPD - though he agreed the situation was under control - still sent a detailed situation report to our [Evil corporate lawyers](https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/2c0dyk/repost_no_your_honor_we_dont_need_the_mass/) asking about people who couldn't be hypothetically fired as a punishment if something went wrong while in possession of test hardware.

Of course all hell broke loose. Two days later by order of the Office of the President the broad white-list accounts authorizing network provisioning for ALL employee test devices were shut down, amusingly by marking them manually as if they belonged to non-paying customers, because it was the fastest way to do it. My 3 test PVRs and my two test modems went red overnight. The way they killed these accounts sent thousands of automated alerts to ['Recoveries'](https://www.google.ca/search?q=bytewave+recoveries&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=Ver9Vr7eJYaJaLelgYgD), our department in charge of harassing bad-faith non-paying customers - but at least, for once, someone thought about the fact this would happen and they had been warned beforehand.

The next day Legal sent everyone with any test device long forms, dead tree 8.5x14 NDAs 'mandatory for further participation in beta testing activities'. For the first time ever we were told anyone not signing extensive legally-enforceable NDAs about these tests would see their test devices confiscated. For enforcement purposes, Legal also ordered all test devices moved to the personal accounts of every employee as well, a process that required an impromptu dedicated taskforce. Took 3 days after I signed those papers before my free test devices were no longer marked as 'non-payment disabled'.

While this entire thing may have been overkill, the worst decision they made was to preemptively shut all test devices down before giving us time to consider signing the NDAs or not. Hello mass confusion and 5AM call spike from employees to tech support's night shift. Another mistake was to not involve the union first; these NDAs could or not infringe on the work contract / the labor code and may be challenged in arbitration to make sure. Though after an *excessively* thorough reading (on the clock) I was OK with the language, some employees refused to sign them and reported the requests as possible work contract violations - meaning less bug reports will get filed and arbitrators will have to decide.

Legal's still hard at work failing to meet my very moderate expectations.

[All of Bytewave's Tales on TFTS!](http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/search?q=author%3ABytewave&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all)