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We're hearing about troubles at Nest

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Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#181

Post by coob »

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 have a Nest. There's a 3rd party app called Skylark[1] that integrates with the Nest API allows you to set Away/Home according to your phone's location and your own geofences.

http://www.skylarkios.com

Works really well.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#182

Post by bobby_9x »

st3v3r wrote: post #167
bobby_9x wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also seen honesty being confused with being an 'asshole'. You tell someone something they don't want to hear, but need to hear, and you are now known as an asshole.

Not usually. People who do that think they're saying something that someone needs to hear, but they're usually either wrong, or saying it in a manner that does make them an asshole.

I disagree. Most people don’t want to hear the truth and will take anything they don’t want to hear as a personal attack against them.

I’ve seen it time and time again.. and then pushed out on social media to make the person that said it look like the bad guy...and since it’s usually one person against another, it’s impossible to defend.

This is why when the technology gets cheap enough, I will have a secret body cam on me at all times.

It’s already been proven many times that privacy no longer matters. Hell, a guy got an entire basketball team taken away from him based on private conversations.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#183

Post by arebop »

dwightgunning wrote: post #142
VikingCoder wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is why we should all be particularly angry when companies in Silicon Valley agree to not try to recruit each-other's employees. It doesn't just hold down wages, it makes it more likely some employee is going to suffer abuse because they don't know what options they have.

I thought the 'agreements' were related to active poaching. I wouldn't bat an eyelid hiring somebody who's already quit or is genuinely on the verge of doing so.

The agreements were variously related to active recruiting (don't cold-call employees of X), passive recruiting (don't hire employees of X), and active retribution for exploring career options (if you at company Y learn of any employees of X seeking jobs at Y, notify management at X). See http://www.hightechemployeelawsuit.com/case-documents.aspx for details about which companies made which commitments.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#184

Post by ghaff »

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"…

And, as someone who lives in the Northeast (where it was -20 F on Saturday night) and travels a lot, reliability absolutely trumps features no matter how cool. And I've heard way too many stories, however anecdotal, about Nests not doing what they're supposed to to use one even if you gave it to me for free. (I do have a programmable Honeywell but it's very basic and I just make a point of changing the batteries every year.)

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#185

Post by sokoloff »

geomark wrote: post #175
pound wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and wait for what? performance-improvement plan as paper trail for firing? "company culture" term is exactly that: company-wide culture. it's not that there is one fucked-up individual and it just happened that his(her) bosses/peers are just not aware of what's going on. it's accepted there, for whatever their rotten reasons are

Correct. You'll get a PIP and, given that management are such a-holes, you will soon be terminated for cause. Not a great thing to have following you if you are early in your career.

In my experience (on the employer side), you will terminated for performance, terminated at will, or at worst terminated for insubordination, but not terminated "for cause". Terminated for cause is very serious and generally means a serious breach of some sort: embezzlement, harassment, breach of contract, etc.

Termination of any of the other sorts is much less serious, usually results in severance and unemployment eligibility, and if you're coming from a place that mistreats its workers, it's generally not a hard story to sell that you stood up for yourself and got whacked for it. Other employers know the jackass employers by reputation, at least in the local area.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#186

Post by ghaff »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #109
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…

Nest always sounded weird me. How can it predict my schedule? Some days I work from home, or take the day off, and so on those days need heat; some days I come home early, or leave late. All of those instances happen constantly, but they aren't predictable. Who really has a schedule that is predictable enough that a thermostat can learn and predict it?

>Who really has a schedule that is predictable enough that a thermostat can learn and predict it?

Actually a lot of people probably do (though I certainly don't either). But a simple programmable thermostat will handle at least the 80% case. I use one and I just bump up the temperature on the weekdays when I'm home and set it to a constant lower temperature when I'm going to be away for a few days. It's really not a big deal.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#187

Post by tsumnia »

thearn4 wrote: post #78
tsumnia wrote: post #30

I didn't work at Nest, but for 2011 to 2012, I was a Systems Analyst for a similar company - selling smart thermostats to Quick Service Restaurants (Taco Bell's and McDonald's). One of the hidden problems we had was maintaining "smart" control when the end-user's thermal comfort level wasn't lining up. We turn on A/C to help dry up some humidity, but what we regard as ok the end-user was now "freezing". The biggest i…

> All the "micro-savings" you have by using PID controllers to 'ramp up' and 'coast down' did nothing for savings. If I can dig up the report, I'll post a link to it. That would be an interesting read. I have a pretty simple Python script controlling a Z-Wave thermostat that I'm pretty satisfied with. I've been curious about how much more efficient I could make it with a PID scheme, with my suspicion being "probably…

Sadly, it seems I can't of discontinued code when the company failed. Its been 4 years since I've seriously cracked that stuff open, so I can't find any of the research papers we looked at. A quick internet search brought me to this page though: http://ilsagfiles.org/SAG_files/Meeting_Materials/2015/6-23-...

To say they "did nothing" isn't to say they weren't better; to have someone constantly controlling your thermostat can be beneficial, but a smart thermostat over a programmable one did " 6.55% on heating and 0.95% on cooling over a programmable thermostat baseline" in terms of savings.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#188

Post by tsumnia »

philippnagel wrote: post #41
tsumnia wrote: post #30

I didn't work at Nest, but for 2011 to 2012, I was a Systems Analyst for a similar company - selling smart thermostats to Quick Service Restaurants (Taco Bell's and McDonald's). One of the hidden problems we had was maintaining "smart" control when the end-user's thermal comfort level wasn't lining up. We turn on A/C to help dry up some humidity, but what we regard as ok the end-user was now "freezing". The biggest i…

Please do. I would be very interested in said report.

Sadly, it seems I can't of discontinued code when the company failed. Its been 4 years since I've seriously cracked that stuff open, so I can't find any of the research papers we looked at. A quick internet search brought me to this page though: http://ilsagfiles.org/SAG_files/Meeting_Materials/2015/6-23-...

To say they "did nothing" isn't to say they weren't better; to have someone constantly controlling your thermostat can be beneficial, but a smart thermostat over a programmable one did " 6.55% on heating and 0.95% on cooling over a programmable thermostat baseline" in terms of savings.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#189

Post by joshmn »

I interviewed for Nest. The experience was great, and they gave me an offer, but one of their employees tipped me off that there's a plethora of issues going on behind-the-scenes.

Upon respectfully declining I received a text message from a number I didn't have in my contact book. Looking into it (being curious) it was a Twilio number. I sent a reply and got the standard Twilio message back. Then I got another text from another number, also a Twilio number, but it seems like they set it up correctly this time, as it didn't send the standard reply.

I asked the employee who tipped me off if he had any idea. He stated, quote, "sounds like something Tony would do."

There was a brief exchange with this second number — I was laughing during it, while they were heated (and disrespected, I think); the individual went out of their way to throw my dirty laundry in my face, mention how they were doing me a favor, bring up how desperately I needed the job because my mother's ill, and say that I'll never have a job again if I decline.

Why would someone accept an offer because you threaten them? I don't know. Today, I'm casually looking for a new gig, though I don't think it has anything to do with Tony.

Re: We're hearing about troubles at Nest

#190

Post by geomark »

sokoloff wrote: post #185
geomark wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. You'll get a PIP and, given that management are such a-holes, you will soon be terminated for cause. Not a great thing to have following you if you are early in your career.

In my experience (on the employer side), you will terminated for performance, terminated at will, or at worst terminated for insubordination, but not terminated "for cause". Terminated for cause is very serious and generally means a serious breach of some sort: embezzlement, harassment, breach of contract, etc. Termination of any of the other sorts is much less serious, usually results in severance and unemployment e…

Terminated for insubordination is actually what I meant. I seem to recall that that was one of the "for cause" criterion, but not absolutely sure. Regardless, at the companies where I worked it meant involuntary termination without eligibility for rehire, no severance, and no unemployment benefits.
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