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Nest is acquiring Dropcam

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Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#101

Post by aragot »

I don't understand their pricing.

$9.99 a month or $99 a year for a rolling 7 days of video. I guess most of that is a still, unattended image. Amazon cloud storage is cheap. It seems very expensive to me.

For example. My flatmate has a child. His ex-partner is prone to make stories in her head and go to the police with that. I'd be keen to host the kid until the father comes back from work, but I'm afraid of the ex-partner's accusations. I'm looking for a cloud storage service to store those hours for a few years, not to serve as legal proof, but to reassure the ex- that nothing weird happened. With Dropcam, that would cost me a few thousands dollars of storage per year, or am I mistaken?

Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#102

Post by hueving »

shiven wrote: post #68
insaneirish wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd work my butt off at a place that provides three-a-day healthy, delicious, diverse, vegetarian (for me) meals > Even after breaking down my yearly compensation to an hourly rate, I bet there will be a marginal difference in the money the company makes by keeping me working the extra hours and the price I'd pay for buying such food everyday Any company providing you multiple meals per day for free is getting the…

In other words, you're getting the short end of the stick. People do not value perks rationally. If they did, they would deny every last one of them. How many people value anything rationally? Ever? As humans we are programmed to be pain averse. I hate foraging for and/or cooking my food. I consider it an utter waste of my time and breath. Yes, I care about my health, but don't have the money to pay an arm and a leg…

>How many people value anything rationally? Ever?

So you admit you are getting a bad deal?

>I hate foraging

Have you EVER foraged in your life?

>I want to eat well (tasty+healthy), but without any direct effort on my part.

If you are talking about the meals that Google provides, there is no evidence that their food is any more healthy than alternatives.

Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#103

Post by hueving »

samstave wrote: post #75
rdl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of value to Google in having everyone on a Google bus being a Googler. You can have sensitive conversations on the bus (also, your employees are less likely to jump ship due to meeting more interesting people...) Google doesn't actually run the bus themselves; it's Bauer. (I hate the SV culture of having sensitive meetings in public cafes and restaurants, especially ones frequented by all your most like…

Kind of funny how your statement is the exact oposite of the famous open office idea: " we have a flat mgmt structure and desks in an open office so the collaboration and free flow of ideas can occur! " SHARED BUSSES!?!?? Wtf! Do we want tech employees sharing ideas and getting poached?!?! What is this communist Russia???

How did you seriously conflate sharing ideas with coworkers and sharing ideas with employees from other companies?

Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#104

Post by hueving »

_delirium wrote: post #43
hueving wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

38 hours? Are you not salaried?

Salaried Google employees, officially at least, work a full-time schedule according to the local standard workweek, which varies by jurisdiction. That's 40 hours in the US/UK offices, 37 hours in the Denmark offices, 38 hours in the Australian offices, etc. And enneff's profile indicates he's in Australia.

Interesting. I know several Googlers in the SV area and none of them work on a 40/hr schedule like that. They work like a regular salaried person where they just do the appropriate amount of work to get their tasks completed on schedule. Sometimes they will have a relaxed week where they only work ~20 hours and other times they will be in a code sprint and do 60-70 hours.

Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#105

Post by hueving »

personZ wrote: post #33
jakozaur wrote: post #3

Google has acquired Nest... so now Google has also acquired Dropcam. I wonder why they call it Nest acquistion, to downplay privacy concerns?

Google has acquired Nest... so now Google has also acquired Dropcam Nest wasn't an acquihire or an assimilation, but was always stated as a separately operating organization. As such, it makes total sense that Nest acquisitions are held as being under Nest. If HBO acquired a show or a studio, you don't say that Time Warner acquired it. If NBC acquires a property, you don't say that Comcast acquired it. These arms len…

>Further it's interesting how much a privacy concern people think Google is on HN, yet in normal life the amount of trust in Google is...actually shocking. I mean Google makes no bones about telling you, endlessly, how much they know about you. They don't hide it.

Interesting. We must hear from different companies. The Google I hear from only says they just know a few basic things like showing an interest in technology and possibly being a male. Google excessively downplays the amount of actual information they have access to via social connections, mobile device usage, search history, email contents, etc.

Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#106

Post by hueving »

gress wrote: post #45
lotu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naturally what what they mean is not, this data will never exist on a computer/network owned by Google. What they mean is we aren't going use video from your security camera for general Google projects, like street view, collecting large amounts of speech databases for voice recognition, figuring out what products you and enjoy using and tailoring advertising to fit that, or tracking epidemics in real time by monitor…

Or providing video to law enforcement on demand.

Well of course they will do that. Any company in the US is compelled to follow the law and give up any information they can possibly access.

Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#107

Post by 3pt14159 »

derefr wrote: post #86
shiven wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, you're getting the short end of the stick. People do not value perks rationally. If they did, they would deny every last one of them. How many people value anything rationally? Ever? As humans we are programmed to be pain averse. I hate foraging for and/or cooking my food. I consider it an utter waste of my time and breath. Yes, I care about my health, but don't have the money to pay an arm and a leg…

A personal chef isn't rational either--there are economies of scale here. But you could pool your and your coworkers' budgets to get an office chef, for an amount from your paycheque much less than the value of the time you're funging against by deciding to work overtime. Fully realized, you could have all the benefits offered (selfishly) by your employing corporation instead provided by an employee's union co-op. Ev…

That would be such a whiney pain in the ass. This is like saying an air conditioned office is an irrational perk, it isn't. It is better for everyone. Besides, if you get your work done at Google there is nothing stopping you from reading a book during the one extra hour of overtime you'd have to waste between lunch and dinner.

Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#108

Post by _delirium »

hueving wrote: post #104
_delirium wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salaried Google employees, officially at least, work a full-time schedule according to the local standard workweek, which varies by jurisdiction. That's 40 hours in the US/UK offices, 37 hours in the Denmark offices, 38 hours in the Australian offices, etc. And enneff's profile indicates he's in Australia.

Interesting. I know several Googlers in the SV area and none of them work on a 40/hr schedule like that. They work like a regular salaried person where they just do the appropriate amount of work to get their tasks completed on schedule. Sometimes they will have a relaxed week where they only work ~20 hours and other times they will be in a code sprint and do 60-70 hours.

I meant average, yeah, not necessarily that you work the same hours every week. However countries also vary a bit in how normal it is for people to work outside of a standard daytime, M-F workweek.

I think even in the U.S., it's only really in the Valley (and maybe also in NYC finance) where a regular salaried job has wild week-to-week variations in working hours. Occasional variations, yes, but in most industries it's expected that you'll work standard hours most of the time (e.g. 8-5, M-F), deviating only when there is some major issue. Every engineering company I've heard of works like that, for example. The main exception is that people do do quite a bit of email outside of work hours.

There are all sorts of practicalities that rely on a predictable work schedule: scheduling your carpool, arranging childcare dropoff/pickup, etc. How does that work in the tech industry? Do people at Google not have carpools, kids, etc.?

Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#109

Post by logn »

insaneirish wrote: post #67
spacehome wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the fact it's nothing like that at all. The perks are free, and employees are generally paid well - when compared to other professions, if, perhaps not their value add.

> The perks are free Haha. That's cute.

The problem with the "company store" was that they paid employees less than their cost of living. And the store sold them items on credit, thus they could never leave the company. This hardly applies to Google or their peers unless you consider the pain of doing your own laundry and cooking your own meals as comparable to crushing debt; which it's not.

Re: Nest is acquiring Dropcam

#110

Post by gniv »

insaneirish wrote: post #66
shiven wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days. WTF is wrong with people!?! I'd work my butt off at a place that provides thrice-a-day healthy, delicious, diverse, vegetarian (for me) meals, on-site gym and sleeping pods!! Hell, I'd have surely done that when I was a decade younge…

> I'd work my butt off at a place that provides three-a-day healthy, delicious, diverse, vegetarian (for me) meals > Even after breaking down my yearly compensation to an hourly rate, I bet there will be a marginal difference in the money the company makes by keeping me working the extra hours and the price I'd pay for buying such food everyday Any company providing you multiple meals per day for free is getting the…

I would argue that if they gave you the money they spend on food in the salary, you would not be able to eat as well (or even half as well). The cost of the food that I get at my company is ridiculously low per person (this might not be true at smaller places, but I am in a 1000+ person office).
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