The first large scale piece of software I worked on was for telcos pre smart phone. We used internal headers to offload authentication and terminate SSL. We also had to pressure F5 to fix about half a dozen bugs in BIG-IP to do so. Bugs that should in no universe have existed in version 9 of a product.
I used to joke that F5 owed me and my coworker 3 months of salary for all the free QA we did for them.
It helps if you realize that BIG-IP 9.0 was essentially a from-scratch rewrite of BIG-IP 4.5. Among other major redesigns, the data plane was moved from BSD kernel space to Linux user space. Internally, the joke was that it would be two times better when we were done (4.5 * 2 = 9.0). It probably was, but not on day zero.
I used to joke that F5 owed me and my coworker 3 months of salary for all the free QA we did for them.