I enjoyed this read, but something in particular I want to call out:

Over time you can start to see patterns with how certain companies work, and if a company says sub-contractor X is causing problem Y, and if you have previous experience with X’s work, you’re one step ahead of solving problem Y. While this information can be invaluable, unfortunately unless you have been doing this type of work for a while, you won’t have a prior catalog of information to sift through. This can sometimes be solved by the simple act of buying another engineer a drink, as this article originally pointed out. Engineers usually will not break NDA but getting gossip about how a company operates is much easier than one might think. I cannot count the number of times I have solved large-scale problems by simply finding out from an ex-engineer, or a friend of a friend of a friend, that company X says they do one thing, but in-fact do another. It is hard to write about these types of problems though, as they tend to involve very specific people at very specific places with very specific problems; writing about them would go against the discreet aspect of my work. Sometimes background information can be used to solve issues ranging from who has the correct animation files to what happened to their millions of dollars.

NDAs hurt engineers. NDAs hurt companies. NDAs hurt users. NDAs hurt everybody.