Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We're hearing about troubles at Nest

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 267 posts

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#111

Post by bitwize »

No shit?! Nest, a real-life object-oriented breakfast food cooker[1] if ever one existed, is having trouble trying to crack the market for things people NEED like heating? Perish the thought!

I live in the northeast. There is no way that I would trust heating my domicile to any cloud-based, internet-of-things-enabled gadget with as many potential failure modes as Nest has, let alone one with the actual failure modes we've seen. If you really want to make heating "smart", an Arduino, an RTC, maybe a temperature sensor for each room, and a way to enter desired heating schedules at the console or via short range wireless will suffice. But most people get by with their dial thermostats.

[1] http://scienceagainstevolution.info/dwj/toaster.htm

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#112

Post by Shooti »

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 don't get it... Google clearly has more than enough in house talent to get those things right. Why aren't they? Why don't they seem to care?

I think it's because "Google" aren't involved at all. Google has it's own approach to IOT called Brillo/Weave that they're focused on. Nest is doing its own isolated thing.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#113

Post by emcrazyone »

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"…

I've been dabbling in the smart home stuff for a few years. Had a gig where some dudes with some VC money paid us to develop a smart home controller - this was circa 1999-2000 but they ran out of money and the project dried up.

I would love to find some hackers who would love to collaborate and do something here.

Funny story: When I was working on the smart home stuff, it was called BeAtHome and the VCs some how got national attention as an energy smart/saving device. We had an office building that was physically connected to a barber shop next door. We shared the same entrace into the building. During the prototyping phase of some of the hardware, we got permission to put a pressure sensitive mat at the front door which would trigger when someone stepped on it. A web cam was then used to snap a picture and we would email this a test account, etc... We had a lot of fun on the project. The idea was a door mat or doorbell could be used to capture pictures of who is at at the front door.

One of the VC guys had a relationship with a company called Icebox which made these under the cabinet flip down screens where you could watch TV & surf the web. We were trying to connect CCTV and WebCams to their screen.

anyway, times have changed and there are so many new technologies out there that I think Nest and Smartthings (Samsung?) is ripe for some serious competition.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#114

Post by potatolicious »

xenadu02 wrote: post #105
w1ntermute wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not that many employees actually left, despite being pissed off. There was no way the Valley élite would let one of their own (Tony Fadell) have a hard fall, so at least a semi-successful exit was guaranteed from the beginning. The reason why Jobs and Fadell could be assholes and still succeed is because they were/are Jobs/Fadell. That doesn't mean you or I can act like assholes and still succeed. Perhaps we…

I'd also point out that Jobs was know to have become less of an asshole by the time he returned to Apple. Some people think it was reconnecting to his family that helped but who knows. You can demand greatness without being an asshole. You can tell someone the work they did isn't good enough without being an asshole. You can also truthfully review someone's bad code without being an asshole, for what it's worth. Bein…

> "Being an asshole != "telling it like it is" though most people confuse the two."

This reminds me of an old quote.

"People who are brutally honest generally enjoy the brutality more than the honesty."

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#116

Post by l1ambda »

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…

TGIF?

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#117

Post by api »

dboreham wrote: post #37
asdfologist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: how did someone with such an abusive management style lead his company to success? I'd think that his employees would just leave and go work elsewhere.

Because behaving like this is moderately correlated with success. You don't have to be an asshole to succeed in business, but it can help.

While not universally correct, this is true more often than it should be.

My personal opinion is that the answer lies in the more primitive parts of the brain. Investors, acquirers, and customers are all human beings, and as human beings they all respond to primate social dominance cues. Investors fund, acquirers acquire, employees perform for, and customers buy from aggressive dominant alpha males because... well... that's what the alpha wants you to do and your brain stem is telling you to obey them. They are pushing ancient buttons that way pre-date the neocortex.

Again, not universal, but there's a part two:

Some investors invest in these types not because they themselves are taken in, but because they know on average others will be. Could a more quiet, reserved, polite personality -- even a more intelligent one -- have managed to sell a simple cloud-connected thermostat for $3.2 billion dollars? Maybe, but statistically probably not.

This will remain true until we find a way to remove legacy code.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#118

Post by realusername »

nostromo wrote: post #25
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"…

The Nest thermostat is a dream compared to the smoke detector. The smoke detector goes off all the time -- without rhyme or reason. With a normal detector, you can just pull the battery if it refuses to shut off. With Nest, you actually need a screw driver to open the battery compartment to turn it off. So, when it decides to wake up the entire house at 3am (yes, the entire house, since they all go off in unison) you…

Is there really a voice like that in the nest fire alarm ?! It really looks like a bad joke, reminds me of playing Portal. This is exactly what a fire alarm in Portal would look like !

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#119

Post by cmrdporcupine »

l1ambda wrote: post #116
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…

TGIF?

Google's weekly all-hands

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#120

Post by LargeCompanies »

outside1234 wrote: post #26
brandon272 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The really great thing about being in software in Silicon Valley is that you can more or less write your own meal ticket somewhere else. My advice to anyone else in this situation is to do just that. The first time abuse happens, just walk out, have a laugh about it (it reflects on them not you), and find another gig. There are a lot of great jobs out there. I have a lot of empathy now for all the crummy jobs where p…

Or record or livestream the abuse using Google Glass and point the media to it like Business Insider.
Post reply on HN