
The Dropcam Team - robbiemitchell
https://medium.com/@gduffy/the-dropcam-team-b9e81f44f259
======
outside1234
Thanks for creating Dropcam - I still love the device even with the Nest
"improvements."

I also worked at Nest (on the thermostat product) and couldn't echo your
comments more strongly.

Tony Fadell is a terrible manager. There are so many public data points at
this point: the perma 6 day work weeks, the "f __* being Googly " comment at
the all hands, refusing to allow Nest employees to have the Google massage
benefits because "they don't deserve it", and now, throwing a great team under
the bus to hide his inability to manage. I have another twenty that I can't
share because of confidentiality and I'm sure you do as well.

The fact that Alphabet/Google hasn't replaced him is a horribly disappointing
statement about what they think is most important: profit, not employees, not
culture. Or maybe not even profit after your comments. :(

Please do write the other story about your acquisition when you can - a lot of
people here could learn a lot from it as a cautionary tale.

~~~
kdamken
Holy moly - 6 days a week?

I can't fathom having to do that at a salaried job and staying for more than
two weeks. Unless they were paying me an obscene amount of money, but even
then, I'd probably be on the look out for something better.

~~~
vvanders
Haha, you'd hate the game dev industry then.

~~~
kdamken
Lol I'm always horrified when I read what it's like for them. I feel like
almost every other kind of developer is well paid and appreciated, yet for
some reason game devs seem to always be overworked, underpaid and
underappreciated with no job security. Maybe it's because more people want to
work in the game industry?

I'd rather have a well paying dev job with reasonable hours, and work on games
in my own time.

~~~
Qworg
Many more people want to work in the game industry. Very few people dream of
creating CRUD apps some day.

Also, the pipeline and recruiting is set up for it. Places like Full Sail are
set up right next door to major studios - you get your training, then you walk
into the meat grinder.

~~~
kdamken
That's sad. I feel like a lot of them would be better off getting a normal,
well paying job as a non-gaming dev, then work on their own projects in their
free time.

~~~
vvanders
Good news is the industry prepares you pretty well(on the development side)
for a career in embedded systems, or high performance compute.

But yeah, gamasutra does a survey each year and the career time in gamedev is
usually around ~3 years.

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supergeek133
The cracks really are starting to show! Also, I've said it for years.. people
don't quit jobs, they quit managers/leaders.

~~~
cylinder
Thank you for this.

~~~
supergeek133
It's actually pretty crazy how much you realize this happens once someone says
that.

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chollida1
Wow, shots fired!

To be fair to Tony Fadell, as I understand it, he made the comments to his
team and not the public, so he was probably speaking more from the hip than he
would have if he was talking to a reporter.

In this case he was trying to assure his team that they shouldn't be worried
about the departures, and one way to do so would be to try and spin it as a
positive. On the other hand, wow, you just said this about people who you are
trying to integrate into your team.

Anyone whose managed people knows how hard it is to keep your employee's
happy, especially when things aren't going well. You are constantly fighting
battles and just when you feel like you've reached your breaking point you get
another burden put on your shoulders.

TL/DR Stress is an awful thing and it makes people react in ways that they
normally wouldn't.

~~~
skuhn
I have encountered this sort of sour grapes reaction to employee turnover a
fair amount over the years. I have literally been told that no one who has
ever left the company has been someone we needed or should have tried to
retain.

Whenever a manager or executive tells the team that they didn't want the
people who left anyway, it makes me think three things:

1\. They shouldn't have continued to employ people who they didn't value in
the first place -- if you have identified someone who isn't working out, it
should be dealt with (fairly and humanely) rather than waiting for attrition
to do your job for you.

2\. This person probably says this about everyone who falls out of their
favor.

3\. For all I know this is what they'll be saying about me in a month, so I
may as well make other plans and be somewhere that values employees
appropriately.

It's really damaging to team morale to make these kinds of blanket statements,
and I don't respect or trust people who refuse to hold themselves to a higher
standard than that.

~~~
dandare
Thanks for putting my thoughts on the paper for me. This should be on a list
of things that only shitty managers say. (r/shittymanagerssay ?)

------
throwaway6497
Couple of things about the Medium article itself.

It is not obvious that "Reed Albergotti’s recent article." is a link. No
anchor tag styling css to know otherwise. On clicking the hidden link I see
the following

" This link came from a private email sent to Greg Duffy and has already been
used to view the full text of the article.

If you are a subscriber please log in. To create your own account, subscribe
or email corporate@theinformation.com.

Subscribe to The Information ... "

It will nice, if we can fix both problems, so your medium article reaches more
target audience.

~~~
jsnell
The link is underlined. But what you need to understand is that Medium is way
too cool to underline text they way a normal website would [0], and instead
does it using a gradient as a background image. Maybe you're blocking
background images, or something like that?

[0] [https://medium.com/designing-medium/crafting-link-
underlines...](https://medium.com/designing-medium/crafting-link-underlines-
on-medium-7c03a9274f9#.f5w06hopd)

~~~
throwaway6497
What? Yes, it is underlined in Safari but not in Chrome. I am checking what is
different in Chrome. I don't have any fancy plugins/extensions in Chrome which
blocks images other than adblock.

~~~
dabernathy89
Underlined for me in Chrome.

------
yalogin
What is happening with Google? Its strange that all their bets are resulting
in these kind of childish situations. I understand unhappy employees leaking
stuff but coming from the upper management like this is not good at all.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Who knows, but there's this vision of home automation that google has bought
into and thinks it can sell. The logical place for your home automation
'master' is your thermostat. Everyone has one and having a nice one is well...
nice and centralizing it as a sensor hub makes a lot of sense. Google saw Nest
and knew it had a lot of potential, so they snapped it up. Now they're trying
to sell us on this idea.

Personally, I'm just not seeing it. The idea of a centralized or master system
is old fashioned. People will just buy automation as they need it. So I'll
have an app on my phone for my Ring doorbell, another for my garage door,
another for my security system, another for my lighting, etc. Google is
betting that people won't want this and want an Apple-like experience of just
having one vendor perform all their tasks, but people without SV salaries
aren't going to casually drop Nest-like prices (total cost of the system with
multiple smoke detectors is in the four digits) all at once and they might
resent a high level of vendor lock-in. They'll just pick up random automation
pieces at home depot for $99 each now and again and just install a new app as
needed. Its not a terrible inconvenience and so what if my doorbell can't talk
to my thermostat.

~~~
cballard
In this case, though, as I understand it (I live in NYC and am thus not the
target market for these types of products besides maybe lightbulbs), Apple's
solution, HomeKit, _does_ allow interaction between disparate products, and
it's even the banner feature!

[https://www.apple.com/ios/homekit/](https://www.apple.com/ios/homekit/)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
But your 'central controller' is your phone's proprietary software. And a
wireless central hub isn't always ideal because that central hub (your phone)
sometimes leaves the house.

