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We're hearing about troubles at Nest

businessinsider.com

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Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#11

Post by outside1234 »

I worked there. It was literally the worst experience of my career - and I have worked at all of the hardest charging blue chips and two successful startups - so it is not about high expectations - but abuse. I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there.

I have a distance from it now -- and a way better job. It made me realize that the culture of a place is really what makes it and that "how" you get results really matter. I bought into the Apple pedigree of the place without understanding that the way Tony got there was through essentially wrecking other people's lives.

I have no idea why Google bought this. Tony literally stood up at an all-hands after the Alphabet thing and said "Fuck being Googley" (direct quote).

Frankly, if I could offer Larry Page once piece of advice it would be to take Tony out front of TGIF and fire him publicly -- all of this comes from Tony. Matt is just his hatchet man and fake cofounder.

There are a lot of great people at Nest and they deserve a better leader.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#12

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

Inevitablities from the Internet of things:

Software glitches, personal data sold or served to the government, personal data stolen by a foreign government, hackers that freeze your house or crank up the heater till it breaks, hackers that spy on your kids with the cameras you installed, automated customer support lines.

For some reason I get the feeling that adopting all of these "smart" devices actually makes me more vulnerable to risk and gives me less control over my life. I'll stick with my dumb house. After all, it was Socrates of all people who criticized writing and reading because he believed it made you worse at remembering things.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#13

Post by TTPrograms »

sjs382 wrote: post #6

> Three former Nest employees independently brought up this same anecdote when describing how Nest had an internal culture where it was "always crunch time" because of unrealistic deadlines and a hierarchical management structure. Oh man, that sounds familiar...

"He has a 68% approval rating on anonymous data-sharing site Glassdoor, but the several ex-employees Business Insider spoke to highlighted an atmosphere of "fear" and said that sitting near Fadell's office meant hearing a constant barrage of shouting."

I really hope the people working there have opportunities elsewhere and are aware of their options. Nobody should feel obligated to work in an environment like that. If more engineers refuse to accept these conditions hopefully executives will be more hesitant to treat their employees this way.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#14

Post by brandon272 »

atonse wrote: post #8

I have a nest and it is a real piece of shit. I usually don't curse on HN but I can barely contain my hate for this product. My absolutely ugly, crappy old thermostat with a needle on it works WAY better than the nest (thankfully we have it upstairs where we sleep). When it's cold, we turn that needle up, and we get warm. With the nest, which is downstairs, when we're cold, we turn the nest up, we get weird "+2 hour"…

Are you sure that an ordinary thermostat "turns your heater on" right away? I know that my furnace, regardless of thermostat, doesn't audibly "turn on" right away. The burners fire up right away (which you can only hear if you're standing next to the furnace) and then the blower turns on some minutes later. In the summer, the Nest turns on the air conditioning unit right away.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#15

Post by sjs382 »

askafriend wrote: post #9
sjs382 wrote: post #6

> Three former Nest employees independently brought up this same anecdote when describing how Nest had an internal culture where it was "always crunch time" because of unrealistic deadlines and a hierarchical management structure. Oh man, that sounds familiar...

"unrealistic deadlines and a hierarchical management structure" describes basically our entire industry....not to imply that we should accept this as the "norm"...but kinda funny the way they put it.

It's the "always crunch time" bit that resonated, along with the reasons why.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#16

Post by letitleak »

yuhong wrote: post #2

I remember when Nest hired a VP of security after I reported 768-bit DHE on one of their servers to Google security.

Sorry to go OT[1], but is there a link to their general (encryption/integrity) policies?

I was shocked they are sometimes delivering the android studio via http and providing only sha1 sums. If your IDE is compromised, then who knows what code you might be signing..

[1](Well I considered it a related matter, as I have trouble telling what googles actually policies are and whether my attempts at feedback will be filtered by a group in some kind of crunch as described or by someone who will be neutrally considering actual policies..)

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#17

Post by [deleted] »

tghw wrote: post #5
murbard2 wrote: post #3

I bought a Nest thermostat and I've been extremely unimpressed with it. It's not just the bugs that will have you wake up in the middle of the night in a freezing home. Even when it works as intended, the product is poorly thought out. - Instead of trying to learn when to apply heat and when not to, which depends on many contextual factors, it seems to be targeting learning a calendar. A calendar does not fully captu…

I've started using IFTTT to work around some of this. For example, I have it set home/away based on an IFTTT geofence. Unfortunately, IFTTT doesn't do home/away yet, but you can write your own trivial "app" to do it simply by registering as a dev and using the Maker channel in IFTTT.

[deleted]

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#18

Post by atonse »

brandon272 wrote: post #14
atonse wrote: post #8

I have a nest and it is a real piece of shit. I usually don't curse on HN but I can barely contain my hate for this product. My absolutely ugly, crappy old thermostat with a needle on it works WAY better than the nest (thankfully we have it upstairs where we sleep). When it's cold, we turn that needle up, and we get warm. With the nest, which is downstairs, when we're cold, we turn the nest up, we get weird "+2 hour"…

Are you sure that an ordinary thermostat "turns your heater on" right away? I know that my furnace, regardless of thermostat, doesn't audibly "turn on" right away. The burners fire up right away (which you can only hear if you're standing next to the furnace) and then the blower turns on some minutes later. In the summer, the Nest turns on the air conditioning unit right away.

Oh definitely, because I'm not just standing there waiting for it to turn on immediately. There have been times when we're freezing, and I tell my wife "just turn the temperature all the way up" and then she says "I did a while back" and when I go to check, it's on 90. So we're talking 20 mins having passed and the heating unit barely coming alive, when in reality it should be on the whole time attempting to heat up to 90.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#19

Post by rbritton »

atonse wrote: post #8

I have a nest and it is a real piece of shit. I usually don't curse on HN but I can barely contain my hate for this product. My absolutely ugly, crappy old thermostat with a needle on it works WAY better than the nest (thankfully we have it upstairs where we sleep). When it's cold, we turn that needle up, and we get warm. With the nest, which is downstairs, when we're cold, we turn the nest up, we get weird "+2 hour"…

Mine at least correctly controls the furnace, but the one feature I bought it for -- a thermostat I can control from my iPhone -- barely works. Their app has gone downhill with every single release, and it's at least half the time that I get a message saying it can't connect.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#20

Post by brandon272 »

outside1234 wrote: post #11

I worked there. It was literally the worst experience of my career - and I have worked at all of the hardest charging blue chips and two successful startups - so it is not about high expectations - but abuse. I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there. I have a distance from it now -- and a way better job. It mad…

> I still wake up with something like PTSD from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell.

This is so depressing. My gut tells me that absolutely no one should have to put up with this in an employment situation, but what are your options, other than to either "deal with it" or face the income and career insecurity that comes with quitting?

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