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Someone Asks People Whose NDAs Have Expired “What Secret Can You Finally Reveal?” And They Delivered 30 Company Secrets
To be ahead of their game, businesses must do everything to keep working projects, innovative ideas, or exciting new products out of the hands of a competitor. But there may also be more sinister reasons why companies keep things under blankets.
And whatever the reason, very often, an NDA comes into play. An NDA (non-disclosure agreement), also known as a a ‘confidentiality clause,’ is a legal and binding contract between parties that keeps the lid on what a company holds as sensitive information. You may be given one as part of an employment contract to protect company secrets or after a dispute to keep details confidential.
Recently, a person who goes by the handle u/The-Christine-X asked those whose NDAs have finally expired “What secret can you finally reveal?” on Ask Reddit. The thread soon turned into a spilled pond full of corporate secrets floating in broad daylight. Psst! More stories from people with expired NDAs can be found in our previous feature right here.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
If you are ever with an elderly loved one and they get a Medicare call, hang up, hang up right away. I worked at a company in downtown Chicago this last year that were absolute slime balls.
All these young agents scamming old people, promising something about this “new upgrade” to their insurance when really they were just taking them off their plan. A lot of these people have Alzheimer’s disease and we’d get POAs calling in saying that we took their mother/father/aunt off a plan and now they can’t get back on their plan for an entire year.
I finally quit because it was so horrific what we had to do to our elders to get a pay check. I personally tried to do everything I could to not be slimy but at the end of the day the whole job was f****d. I took a man off his plan and was going to have him start a new one the following month. He didn’t have his medication list on him so told me he would email it to me. He finally emails me a list of it least 20 medications, one of his medications that was covered for like 20 bucks on his plan would literally go up thousands of dollars on the plan I put him on. I called him back and spent two hours canceling what we had signed him up on. I still feel horrible to this day. Imagine if he forgot to send me that list of medication.
Listen to me, as a past Medicare advisor, do NOT let your parents/grandparents take these calls. Medicare advantage plans are f****d and Medicare advisors are 20 sum year
Old kids who will do anything to get them taken off their plan.
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#2
That Facebook is every bit as horrible as people think it is. What struck me most is the culture of silence there. You cannot talk openly about concerns of the effects of Facebook as an engineer without vague references of it showing up in performance reviews. Perhaps people have a more comic book style evil corporation in mind but in Facebook coercion happens with performance reviews, strict metrics chasing, and not talking about the broader implications of those metrics. Take for example chasing the average session length metric, ie how long you’re likely to stay on Facebook at any given time. Seems innocuous at first until you realize this is where radicalization and spread of misinformation happens. Because as it happens what keeps peoples attentions the most effectively is sensational posts and polarizing posts targeting peoples outrage. Not only does this give you a skewed view of the world, but it rewards the people spreading misinformation and rage bait. It’s not that Facebook inherently plans to maximize peoples outrage, it’s just their metrics chasing makes them the most money by finding these patterns. Then like I said, it’s awfully convenient to just stay silent and count the cash. It’s the pinnacle (in my experience) of the banality of evil
Eagle Girl 2 years ago
Everyone should delete FB App & use web browser on your phone. No more access to Messenger? Ask yourself Why? Hmmm....FB/Meta, all the social tech co, make the CIA look like preschool
#3
I worked for a company that did screenprinting and engraving, and one of their biggest clients was the US military. They bought EVERYTHING from China. They had a person who would cut out the "Made in China" tags, and replace them with "Made in USA" tags.
T Kory 2 years ago
Same thing happens to materials for construction projects for US feds. A certain percentage of materials are required to be “made in the USA.” A lot of materials are bought cheaply from other countries and the label or other markers are changed. Seems to be a well known secret but no one cares. Follow the money 💰
#4
Never open a document with DocuSign on your phone, we took ever piece of data we could get our hands on.
#5
Even if you walk away with nothing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, you still get money for doing the show.
#6
When a pharmacy's stock of medication expires, they can't just throw it away. So they hire pharmaceutical waste disposal companies to take it away and dispose of it properly.
The "pharmacy" I worked for bought expired medication and supplies under the table from one of these disposal companies and resold them at full price.
EDIT: Naming and shaming would be complicated because the business operated under a constantly changing chain of mail-order pharmacies. When insurance companies would get enough complaints about one they would deny coverage, at which point patients would be shuffled to another pharmacy in the chain while the impacted pharmacy quietly closed and reopened under a new name.
The good news: they were busted and folded pretty quickly under the weight of having to operate like an honest pharmacy. Company in question is no more.
#7
Used to work for Billy Joel and he did start the fire. It was all a lie. It wasn't burning since the worlds been turning, it started when he drunkenly knocked a candle onto shag carpeting.
K-Hey 2 years ago
Nah, just the Stranger, but he gives into his desires every time the stranger comes around...
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Night Owl 2 years ago (edited)
well, looks like he at least shot the sheriff
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Hannah Hudson-Lee 2 years ago
After all the sad stories on this thread, this properly cheered me up(town girl).
Whitney-Blair Beals 2 years ago
And here I thought he was educating us about pivotable people from the 50s and 60s hahahaha
Alan Strachan 2 years ago
I worked for a cable TV company. That movie on your bill you didn't order but were charged for that your cable provider said "it's impossible for the equipment to order it on its own" totally was 100% ordered by the box on its own and the companies 100% know it happens but tell staff to deny it
Alicia Kessinger Bader 2 years ago
I don't understand what you are talking about. Would someone please clarify for me. I'm 67, love Billy Joel, but really ... this is over my head. Thanks to anyone who tries.
#8
The big financial houses in NYC knew about the impending crash at least 6 months before it started in 2007.
I was at an investment conference when I heard the heavy-hitters discussing it before going on stage. I will never forget the sentence:
“What do we do? Go out there and tell them we are all f****d?”
They proceeded to go out there and peddle their “everything is great!” b******t.
I had never heard the word “tranche” before that day.
Fiery Llama 2 years ago
I highly recommend the book "The Big Short"- a LOT of people knew, and before six months too. The movie's pretty good, books even better.
#9
Part of Amazon's associate training is literally how to lie when asked certain questions, and there was a "social" part of the contract that discouraged speaking poorly about Amazon with friends and on social media.
Cold Contagious 2 years ago
My daughter and her husband work for Amazon and people have been fired from where they work for talking smack on Facebook about work occurrences.
#10
Worked for an online gambling site. No matter how much you win or lose, the site always wins, and the odds are absolutely rigged. Also, the accounts of obvious addicts have to be banned (by law), but no one really cares if that person then just creates another account.
#11
Worked for a company that built hip implants. Some of them were custom, made-to-order based on CAT scans. The quality of the modeling was dubious and we had several fabs where the implant bent in the patient. The company always blamed the patient for "putting on too much weight". The company was also paying back physicians for ordering their 'custom' implants which were obviously more expensive than the standard ones (paid by public insurance). I quit the week I found this out. And I only knew the bare minimum of one case.
This activity led to a legal case of fraud and ... other stuff. People (doctors, administrators of the company) went to jail or were fined. Somewhere in that process (and I still can't talk about some of the details) I signed multiple NDAs with a health agency covering lack of oversight and relevant communications. This was a clusterfck on all levels - graft, corruption, material choices, medical controls. No one died, but the medical quality of services I was involved in was severely affected and decades later it still bothers me. Lesson learned, keep an eye on regulatory aspects of your businesses.
#12
I work in finance.
The computer does not tell me your rates.
Your rates are determined by my mood that day and whether or not you complimented my shirt
Eagle Girl 2 years ago
Lol!!!!!!!!! True!!!!!! Worked in a car dealership. The F&I guy taught me things that would make your jaw drop. People are all cautious negotiating the price than "Trust'" the soft-spoken guy in the suit. He makes more than the GM being "nice" to you. He should smile. Tip? Walk out at least one & make them call you. This applies to sale & rate.
#13
During my geology PhD I visited the site of a proposed waste disposal site. A preliminary geophysical survey identified a strange anomaly, a deep linear feature trending to the south south west. Looked like a buried river valley. The site needed investigating for a environmental impact statement / report, part of the planning application. My access to the site and investigation included a NDA, I couldn't publish anything about it until after the rubbish dump was built and a 5 year Stay was put on my thesis (access was restricted to only a few people).
My PhD supervisor also thought the a anomaly was an ancient buried river valley, perhaps a few million years old. This is exactly what the people who wanted to build the rubbish dump wanted to hear, as they absolutely could not put a rubbish dump over or near a Karst feature (dissolved limestone). Contamination could leak into the ground water.
We drilled into the center of the anomaly in 2003, we encountered peat and gravels, then 40 meters of clayey lake sediments, then some more gravels, but then we found 65 meters of hard clay (in fact two layers of clay, 40 meters of orange clays and 25 meters of white clay). We hit limestone bedrock at 128.32 metres depth (33.3 metres below sea level).
The hard clays were left behind after the limestone dissolved. It was Karst. A type of Karst called a Pocket Deposit. They were also found in they UK, the clays were used to make pipes (pipe clay) and cheap pottery. They were around 15 million years old, judging by the fossil pollen and leaves they found.
By the time the Stay ended, the rubbish dump was built, close to the anomaly. Where is should not be.
Cold Contagious 2 years ago
Their loopholes are convenient to get the dump built regardless of whether it was hazardous or not to the environment.
#14
I worked for Equifax about 20 years ago. We were doing things with your data we weren't supposed to do. I know this is going to come as a great shock to a lot of people.
#15
I worked for a company that audited medical bills and looked for stuff that wasn't charged. If you were not billed for something they would try to collect on it and get a share of that. If you were billed for something and should not have been, well sucks to be you, moving on, no refunds.
#16
When I worked for State IT, we weren't supposed to provide details of what hardware was being used or operating systems. In the nineties, I took on an old server, souped it up, and put Linux on it to run our networks. This was pretty radical at the time because everyone else was using something proprietary (Like Netware) and I was able to deliver services for free (email and samba) they were paying out the nose for.
The NDA wasn't about security. It was about keeping how much money they were wasting under wraps.
censorshipsucks 2 years ago
we actually have a policy that we are supposed to use linux (south africa), but our government IT department is run by old Afrikaners who are obsessed with windows because that's all they learnt to use during the sanctions in the 1980s.
#17
I was working at a hospital as an Intern. There was a woman who had a brain Tumor a while a go. She got in for a check up, six months pregnant and having depression. The doctor thought he found a new Tumor so she had another brain operation. But there was no Tumor and they cut her head open for nothing. And after she woke up they didn’t tell her this, instead acted like they removed it successfully.
Edit: I made an internship at the hospital for a few months. I completely forgot that intern in the medical context means someone who wants to become a doctor and studied medicine.
#18
Marketing companies will hire Jr people, give them amazing titles, and then charge the client outstanding fees per position and pay those people Jr pay, pocketing everything as profit.
The time they charge on estimates is double what it actually takes.
Viktor 2 years ago
That’s default in every consulting company ever. Start as a junior consultant fresh from uni and go to medior to senior to manager within 4-5 years. And the consulting fees charged to the company are easily 700 per day for a junior and 1200 for a senior. The consultants themselves are a tiny portion of that.
#19
I worked on the Walking Dead during college. I saw a ton of main and side characters die in my few seasons I worked on. They made us sign NDAs every day we worked on set.
#20
Chase Bank mortgage division uses outdated technology it bought for hundreds of millions of dollars from Quicken/Rocket Mortgage. It's a DOS based system that Quicken created around 20 years ago.
They also purposely handicap their sales people who work off commissions. To avoid paying out larger commissions if they are doing well, they will be pooled into recieving worse leads or put on special assignments that limit productivity. In worst case scenarios when a sales person finds a way to break the system and make more money than Chase planned to pay out they dig through the employee's chats or personal files to find reasons to terminate them.
Chase also promotes internally to inflate their number of higher level positions held by minorities. Sounds great on the surface, but they do so artificially. Typically positions are filled by recruiting /HR. But whenever they want to bump the numbers they open a position that only "inclusion" candidates can apply for. Inclusion Candidates are code for non-white or non-disabled. These positions are usually for low level management that is planned to be cut in the near future.
Oh! And they give blatant preferential treatment to employees with children to avoid lawsuits. They lost a big one a few years back over father's getting equal maternity leave time.
Michael Largey 2 years ago
"And they give blatant preferential treatment to employees with children to avoid lawsuits" ? Sounds like they just learned to obey the law.
#21
The rabbits who don’t get adopted are fed to the python.
#22
That video game that was terrible on release? It was terrible in beta, and alpha, and we weren't allowed to warn you.
Jon S. 2 years ago
It amazes me that game companies would rather release a terrible game, taking a hit to their reputation than put it on hold and redesign. I can understand for some very small companies that have cashflow problems and live by a 'release or sink' cycle, but not the bigger companies who must have cash reserves and are reliant on continued goodwill towards their flagship games.
#23
I did data entry for a lifestyle seminar company….names, email, home addresses, credit card numbers…All being handed by underpaid, over caffeinated college students…u do the math
Random person 2 years ago
My brain getting in an all out war with my conscience: B: STEAL THE MONEY C: NO
#24
Reggie Fils-Ame said the recent issues with contractors was not the culture at Nintendo when he worked there.
He’s a liar. I worked there while he was the head of NoA, it absolutely was the culture there.
Carol Emory 2 years ago
I will say, after working at NoA, it wreaks with office politics. Their call center staff are paid well and benefits are good, but the staff are treated like c**p. They screwed my husband out of his bonus that he was promised because he took a couple of weeks off to recoup from mental health issues. They said he'd been fired which 1) they could not do since he was on medical leave and 2) their own rules stated that, unless you did something that would require you to be immediately terminated like leaking info or assaulting someone, you had to go through two stages of disciplinary action which included a meeting with a manager to discuss how to correct the situation...neither of which they did with my husband. Never work for NoA.
#25
I boxed up the first batch of Nokia Lumia smartphones. They were delivered in a blacked out Van with a convoy, all the work our company did was supervised by armed guards.
I was part of the crew that sent out letters to BP stockholders when the Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico happened. The pages were printed with a very interesting method that imprinted the text onto the page, but left the rest if the toner semi-bonded. So the page came out completely black off the printer, straight into an envelope with a special label that was printed out similarly. They were collected by a different blacked out van
I saw all the Specs and diagrams 2010 for the 2014 release of the Land Rover Discover and Range River Sport, including detailed engine breakdowns. I still have the book somewhere, as well as like 5 or 6 4GB USB brackets that were packaged with them.
I can't remember the name of the gallery, but there was a fun set of prints that only 100 or so were sold. The one that sticks with me was a lady lying naked with what looked like bolognese on her, topped with a raw egg. The print sets sold for like £10,000 a pop, and I had a set just chilling in a box. Something like 3000 sets were printed and only the best ones went out
Working for a printing company was pretty good sometimes!
Who Panda 420 2 years ago
Bored Panda really should take responsibility for that oil spill! / Kidding I always think that when I see BP now
#26
I worked for a publicly traded company in the late 2000s. They had one PC running Windows 95 and Access 97. That was a very important database- without it, the company couldn’t run its monthly and quarterly accounting procedures. The head of IT didn’t know how to upgrade the database.
The company’s long gone.
—
There’s another company I was let go from because they didn’t like the way I stapled. I worked in IT. They’re long out of business.
I work for much better companies now.
Dead Died Death 2 years ago
We interviewed someone for a junior SQL server Dev role who told us that we should "upgrade" our systems to run off Access, this was in 2008ish.
#27
Cyber security at many small to midsize credit unions and banks is usually close to non existent. Shocker I know.
Few examples I saw in one place.
* The mapped drive each employee got had no security, you could just go into any other employees and do what you wanted.
* Users group was added to Administrators on every laptop/desktop. This did not extend into the server network, but any employee could do anything on any other desktop/laptop. They also could install anything they wanted in the days of ransomware.
* There was no network segmentation at the branches. So the bank manager who kept installing malware was on the same network as the teller behind the counter.
* Backups were not ever tested until needed. When they were needed they found out they didn't work.
* Windows update was broken on about 5-10% of machines for years.
I could go on but that was some of the more major ones I ran into. I fixed basically all of those at that place but I still work in the industry at another level/company and can tell this problem is widespread.
Sue User 2 years ago
Backups not tested..oh the feels. Worked for a manufacturing company in the 90s. The other plant was 3 hours away. There was no IT there. Someone in the office was swap out the backup tapes System goes down, travel 3 hours to do a restore, only to find the tape blank. Every tape was blank. Backup was going to /dev/ null
#28
One of the most prestigious consulting companies, starting with M, was going for more diversity in hiring when I was there. Their idea was to reject all CVs that came from males. Just like that, without reading. They would also have a filter in their hiring software to only pass on female names included in their filter.
Also, in certain places they would only read CVs coming from people with clearly “black” names, rejecting everything else. They would hold meetings discussing whether a CV comes from a black person if there was no picture included. Everything just to avoid calling “the wrong candidate.”
If anyone’s wondering, these practices are highly illegal. This was in 2017. Then I left, but I doubt they changed their ways.
JB 2 years ago
I’m not a fan of “positive discrimination” because I believe all discrimination is ultimately negative and leads to choosing someone for a role regardless of whether they can do it or not just so the optics look good or, worse, legal quotas applied to corporations are met for minimum acceptable diversity. I don’t believe that is good for the company nor the individual. Yes, what this company did was illegal and morally bankrupt, but I can see how they came to implement these terrible policies under pressure from their customer base who were being rewarded or punished for the diversity of their employees. Reluctantly, I accept and support it as a necessary evil when it’s the only way for those who have been systemically discriminated against to have a chance. For them to be able to rise above the circumstances they were born into whether that be their skin or having the ‘right’ genitalia, loving the ‘right’ gender, believing the ‘right’ religion.
#29
A very popular Spanish supermarket chain was planning on setting up a facial recognition system on their CCTV to track their employees.
I don't know if they followed through with it.
#30
Basically all donations go to "operating costs".
What do you think ?
James Nelson Jr 2 years ago
Cause what they're saying is lies just to fill in more spaces would be my guess
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Wang Zhuang 2 years ago
This list really sucks because very few people named the companies they were working for. If the NDAs expired, why not give more details about the companies?
Daniel Yamada 2 years ago
I worked for a printing company that started doing work for the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. I called to ask them about security requirements for the contest forms we were about to start printing. I was told “It doesn’t matter. None of them are winners.”
IlovemydogShilo 2 years ago (edited)
A company I once worked for had a policy that everybody started working on probation for 3 months. In that 3 months we were on half pay and could be sacked at any moment and nothing could be done or said about it because you were on probation. The turn over of staff was unreal. They would make up the stupidest reason for sacking people and it was always just the 3 month probation period was up. This was so they could get someone else in to get the cheap labour. I was told the reason I was sacked was because I took an afternoon off when I should have been working. I did take the afternoon off but I was told to go home by one of the managers. This was another one of their dirty tricks. If it was quiet they would send you home. They wouldn't pay you and wouldn't declare that they told you to go home and than just as your probationary period was up they would fire you on the spot and tell you that this was the reason why or some other stupid reason. They did keep a few on after the 3 months but it would probably be one in 30 or so just to make it look legal but even then most of them would be gone a few months after that. It was a horrible place to work for. But I suppose that's what you get when you work for a clown. I wasn't lovin' it.
Amazon QT 2 years ago
You just described how every Amazon Order Fulfillment Centers works… they have their own “temp agency”. You get hired through that dept and they don’t have to pay you any benefits during the duration or your employment with them. They can keep you on as a temp for several years and then just let you go for whatever reason they want. Ask me know I know!!
Load More Replies... That'sEndorable 2 years ago
There aren't donors who like challenging NPR listeners. As a public charity, your local NPR station must get at least 1/3 of their donations from the general public. But they typically rely on a tiny number of gigantic contributors. So if a corporate sponsor wants to give them another $20 million, they need to raise another $10 million from other sources. Hence, the "challenges." Your local NPR or PBS station is very minimally funded by listeners like you, and they don't give a damn what you want to hear or watch. They air what their corporate sponsors want aired.
Mia Hamsa 2 years ago
I worked for a well known furniture company: They absolutely have to have all the sample furniture come in fully functional, finished as if to go to store. Not because they can't understand how the furniture would work without functioning drawers (you could glue the fronts and pretend) which would cost massively less in sampling/prototype costs. No, it is because the directors get first dibs and can get those prototypes for almost nothing and kit out their houses and any decoration jobs they have at the expense of the investors in the form of expense costs. It was amazing to hear their reasons why they needed the prototypes to be fully working (all BS) and then see them snag them for their homes.
K- THULU 2 years ago
Yes but the owner would deal with that. I was pretty naive at the time and only realized that was standard practice when I was cleaning out the eagle's cage and found the remains of my favorite goat. I was heartbroken... Loved that goat.
K- THULU 2 years ago
This comment turned up in wrong place... Reply to a comment that doesn't appear here! oops!
Load More Replies...
Isaac Harvey 2 years ago
If you're going to try to scam people, please at least use proper English grammar.
Load More Replies... James Nelson Jr 2 years ago
Cause what they're saying is lies just to fill in more spaces would be my guess
Load More Replies... Wang Zhuang 2 years ago
This list really sucks because very few people named the companies they were working for. If the NDAs expired, why not give more details about the companies?
Daniel Yamada 2 years ago
I worked for a printing company that started doing work for the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. I called to ask them about security requirements for the contest forms we were about to start printing. I was told “It doesn’t matter. None of them are winners.”
IlovemydogShilo 2 years ago (edited)
A company I once worked for had a policy that everybody started working on probation for 3 months. In that 3 months we were on half pay and could be sacked at any moment and nothing could be done or said about it because you were on probation. The turn over of staff was unreal. They would make up the stupidest reason for sacking people and it was always just the 3 month probation period was up. This was so they could get someone else in to get the cheap labour. I was told the reason I was sacked was because I took an afternoon off when I should have been working. I did take the afternoon off but I was told to go home by one of the managers. This was another one of their dirty tricks. If it was quiet they would send you home. They wouldn't pay you and wouldn't declare that they told you to go home and than just as your probationary period was up they would fire you on the spot and tell you that this was the reason why or some other stupid reason. They did keep a few on after the 3 months but it would probably be one in 30 or so just to make it look legal but even then most of them would be gone a few months after that. It was a horrible place to work for. But I suppose that's what you get when you work for a clown. I wasn't lovin' it.
Amazon QT 2 years ago
You just described how every Amazon Order Fulfillment Centers works… they have their own “temp agency”. You get hired through that dept and they don’t have to pay you any benefits during the duration or your employment with them. They can keep you on as a temp for several years and then just let you go for whatever reason they want. Ask me know I know!!
Load More Replies... That'sEndorable 2 years ago
There aren't donors who like challenging NPR listeners. As a public charity, your local NPR station must get at least 1/3 of their donations from the general public. But they typically rely on a tiny number of gigantic contributors. So if a corporate sponsor wants to give them another $20 million, they need to raise another $10 million from other sources. Hence, the "challenges." Your local NPR or PBS station is very minimally funded by listeners like you, and they don't give a damn what you want to hear or watch. They air what their corporate sponsors want aired.
Mia Hamsa 2 years ago
I worked for a well known furniture company: They absolutely have to have all the sample furniture come in fully functional, finished as if to go to store. Not because they can't understand how the furniture would work without functioning drawers (you could glue the fronts and pretend) which would cost massively less in sampling/prototype costs. No, it is because the directors get first dibs and can get those prototypes for almost nothing and kit out their houses and any decoration jobs they have at the expense of the investors in the form of expense costs. It was amazing to hear their reasons why they needed the prototypes to be fully working (all BS) and then see them snag them for their homes.
K- THULU 2 years ago
Yes but the owner would deal with that. I was pretty naive at the time and only realized that was standard practice when I was cleaning out the eagle's cage and found the remains of my favorite goat. I was heartbroken... Loved that goat.
K- THULU 2 years ago
This comment turned up in wrong place... Reply to a comment that doesn't appear here! oops!
Load More Replies... Isaac Harvey 2 years ago
If you're going to try to scam people, please at least use proper English grammar.
Load More Replies... Related on Bored Panda
