
We're hearing about troubles at Nest - marvel_boy
http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-going-on-at-nest-2016-2
======
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.

~~~
asdfologist
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.

~~~
potatolicious
Most people (regardless of actual qualification) are bad at finding jobs, and
for most people job-hunting is full of anxiety, dread, and in general just a
thoroughly unpleasant process.

As an industry we're also pretty terrible at recruiting - people who've
figured out how to network effectively and come through the side doors do
pretty well, but the bulk of the industry still pursues the model of "see job
ad, send resume through front door, quietly wait for call back". This adds to
the frustration of job hunting.

Many people also find interviews extremely stressful - our industry makes this
worse by sticking them through exhausting full-day marathons full of seemingly
pointless trivia.

Not so long ago I was stuck in a horrible job with truly abusive managers.
_Everyone_ hated it and commiserated copiously after work (we drank a lot back
then), and everyone talked about leaving. Out of the 20-odd people only 4
actually ended up leaving (including me).

When I asked people about it it was nearly universally about anxiety and fear.
People _loathe_ interviewing, applying, and all that, to a point where they're
willing to put up with a _lot_ of pain just to avoid it.

~~~
throwaway6497
Also, most people are supporting a mortgage + one/two kids + spouse. It is
easy for a person with FU money to just quit the job on a whim, and search for
a new job. A majority of software engineers are still scared of being
unemployed. Imagine being without a job in Silicon valley for a few months
(high mortgage/rent + kids + spouse). Your savings will deplete fast; It is
kind of scary and it is the biggest reason why people put up with abuse till
they find a way out.

------
atonse
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" things, and nothing happens. The heater doesn't come on,
we're freezing and the thing has a mind of its own. I have taken photos where
I've set the thermostat at 90 degrees, the room is at about 60 degrees, and
the Nest hasn't turned the heating unit on.

This is a the worst kind of sin of user experience, when a user feels like the
machine controls them, and not the other way round.

As big a nerd as I am, and loved that the Nest shook up the thermostat
industry, I absolutely regret buying a Nest. I wanted to love this product,
but it fails spectacularly at the ONE thing it's supposed to do, which is to
let us set a comfortable temperature for our house.

Because of this experience, I absolutely avoid their smoke detectors (I was
ready to buy three of them before buying the thermostat). I've told family and
friends to stay away as well.

~~~
nostromo
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'll need to go find a screw driver to get
it to shut up.

The one flippin' reason I bought a Nest Protect was so I could "wave to
silence" an alarm. Well, every time it goes off, it tells me that "this alarm
cannot be silenced" \- even by pushing the power button. Not once have I been
able to turn off an alarm without removing the batteries.

The worst feeling is when you get an alert on your iPhone while nobody (but
your pet) is home. "Alert: your house is on fire." Then you rush home and
realize it's a false alarm.

After our fourth or fifth false alarm we returned them all and replaced them
with the old-fashioned alarms.

Watch this hilarious video if you're considering buying a Nest Protect:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY)
(warning: loud alarms in video)

~~~
Eiriksmal
That's a horrible experience.

But, to be fair, many newer structures have all their smoke detectors wired
together so when one goes off, they all go off. I experienced that in my
house, built in '97, which was extremely disorienting and stressful when it
first happened. Growing up in a house built in the 80s, only the kitchen's
smoke detector would go off if you burned something. I understand the
perceived safety enhancement, but waking up the sleeping baby because dumb ol'
dad smoked too much oil when stir frying something... Ugh.

Edit: formatting.

~~~
Animats
Yet industrial/commercial grade hard wired smoke detectors work just fine.
I've worked in industrial facilities where there were thousands of smoke and
fire detectors, and a zero false alarm rate. Yet, one day, when a HVAC unit
overheated and smoked, all the right stuff happened. The local alarms went
off, and the duct dampers slammed shut to contain the smoke. But because there
wasn't confirmation from a second detector, or water flow in the sprinklers,
the full emergency power off and building evacuation sequence didn't trip. We
got to the HVAC unit and pulled its main switch before things escalated.

So why can't Nest meet that standard of performance?

~~~
a3n
Because they're disrupting thermostats.

~~~
derrida
Success.

------
murbard2
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 capture the knowledge about your schedule
that a thermostat could gain.

\- It would be trivial for the thermostat to figure out if your phone is
connected to your home network, indicating that you might be home and don't
want to be cold. AFAIK, it doesn't bother doing that. I live on a different
floor from my thermostat, and thus it often concludes that I'm away.

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?

~~~
tghw
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.

~~~
murbard2
This type of workarounds would make sense if we were dealing with a product
built by a few makers and released as a set of blueprints online...

This is produced by a company that Google, the most valuable company in the
world, bought for $3.2B. It's weird that one needs to script around these
issues.

~~~
eli
That's a workaround of IFTTT limits not Nest

~~~
st3v3r
But the use of IFTTT itself is a workaround of issues/limits with the Nest.

~~~
eli
Not really a limit so much as a feature that you wish it had.

------
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.

------
tsumnia
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 issues and where I think the "always crunch time" mentality is due
to the fact that customers ALWAYS have A/C or Heat. Messing with it leaves a
very negative opinion, especially when we you think they want and what they
really want don't match up. I remember tech supporting a call at 11pm on
Christmas Eve because I was on duty and the steakhouse in Texas was having a
party (Side note: AC units can't handle a lot of people in a confined space).
Another time, I made trips to many fast food places the day before
Thanksgiving since I was already driving that way to see family. I started at
6am and didn't get to my parents til 8pm.

Sadly after the Nest and the Internet of Things spark, a report came out about
a year later that pointed out just having a simple HVAC scheduler was all you
truly needed to be energy efficient. 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.

~~~
thearn4
> 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 not too much more".

~~~
tsumnia
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-...](http://ilsagfiles.org/SAG_files/Meeting_Materials/2015/6-23-15_Meeting/CLEAResult_Smart_Thermostat_WhitePaper_20150505.pdf)

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.

------
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.

~~~
jarek
> 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.

Oh, of course it does. Consider: when are you more in control, when you know
the city you're in inside-out, or when you're depending on Google Maps?

~~~
VikingCoder
You're considering only one dimension.

Consider: When you are in a new city, when are you more likely to learn the
city inside-out, when you don't have Google Maps, or when you do?

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
It's a mix. If I need to get somewhere specific I'll follow directions, but if
I'm browsing then I don't learn much by looking down at a screen the whole
time.

Last time I was in DC for a conference in Foggy Bottom I got a recommendation
for a pizza shop a few blocks from my hotel. &pizza, not bad.

Next day I went to that general area and browsed around looking for a bar.
Because I didn't just look up bars on Yelp I was able to distinguish the
character of the places I walked around, like the feel of a neighborhood that
primarily houses GWU students, and another that is for unreasonably wealthy
urban homeowners.

tl;dr I get what I want from a maps app when I know what I want. If I don't
know what I want, I go out and learn by experience.

------
nommm-nommm
The problem with "smart" anything is that the more features you add the more
places there is to break.

The coffee maker in my office has a color touch screen. What advantage is a
color touch screen over a "dumb" mechanical switch? None, but I am sure its
more likely to break and much more expensive to fix/replace.

Yes, the touch screen has one button - make coffee. Then it plays animations
while your coffee is brewing. Then it says "coffee done."

In my opinion smart features should be added very sparingly and fill an actual
need not just "oh, cool" or "cuz we could." Otherwise I'd pick the "dumb"
version every time.

~~~
st3v3r
Are you sure it's not the one that has options for the different sizes?

~~~
culturestate
Even if it is, does that justify a touchscreen? My Nespresso supports three
sizes by having three physical buttons; that doesn't strike me as particularly
onerous.

------
FireBeyond
I've grown more and more disenchanted with my Nest. Reliability has gone way
downhill - I used to be able to log in to the app and turn Away mode off
before coming home to warm the house.

Now? With the same WAPs, same firmware (on the WAP), same SSID, etc, most of
the time (at least 75%) the app will act as if its sent the request (indeed,
it initially is reporting 'realistic' figures from the thermostat as to
current temperature and settings), and reflects the change (i.e. turning
orange, saying Heat On).

Except if you refresh the display. In which case it tells you that there's a
communication error and it can't find your Nest.

And the actions haven't actually gone through. And nothing you can do will
change anything.

Get home, hit "Home" manually? All of a sudden the app works again.

Nest Support? "Likely a problem with your wireless access point not supporting
WPA properly" Uhh? This used to work fine, the network is WPA2, and everything
else on the network never complains.

------
demian0311
I have Nest thermostat and a Nest camera. Thermostat is in the hallway and
regularly thinks nobody is home. Camera knows I'm home because of movement (or
I should be able to show it how to tell). But the Camera doesn't talk to the
thermostat.

You create a dependency when devices connect to the Internet and you may give
up some privacy. In return I assume you'd get some intelligence and
integration.

~~~
brandon272
My #1 issue my Nest is that my house is always freezing in the winter because
it always thinks I'm not home as I might be home but not necessarily walk in
front of the thermostat routinely. Hence it switches to "Auto Away" mode.

It would be nice if the Nest app I had on my phone could identify that I'm
home (i.e. am I connected to my home WiFi network, or check my location via
GPS) and then communicate that to my thermostat.

~~~
notwhereyouare
I saw an app on the play store a while back that did exactly that. It worked
with the nest API and your phone, you said what wifi's and what areas and it
pinged the nest to keep it in home mode.

It's called Away Smarter on the google play store.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geeksville...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geeksville.awaysmarter)

------
sjs382
> 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...

~~~
IgorPartola
A great way to fix that is to add more managers to gain better control of your
runaway teams. Microsoft Project might be a good solution to get them back on
track too. Planning out every hour of the project at the beginning really
helps developers focus and get things done. Oh, and you want to introduce
daily status meetings, preferably in the morning. As a final step, it helps to
let a few people go and put a hiring freeze on developers. You don't want to
reward their departments' bad behavior by giving them more people. I've seen
this done at several companies before and it always leads to spectacularly
amazing results. </sarcasm>

~~~
siquick
I was crying inside until I saw the saracasm tag...

~~~
IgorPartola
I was hoping for that reaction.

------
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](http://scienceagainstevolution.info/dwj/toaster.htm)

------
xauronx
I was recently contacted by Nest due to a project I posted on Reddit.
Evidently their head of engineering saw the project and told them to see if
I'd be interested in working there. I said I would love to continue with the
interview process... a week later they contacted me and said they were at
capacity for developers and would not be proceeding. Really kind of crazy for
a company of that size, in my opinion.

Seems like a bullet dodged at this point. A little concerned for my little app
project though. They're taking weeks to approve my API access, to the point
that I feel they're damaging my chances of succeeding.

------
protomyth
Software written by people who are working weekends / 50+hr weeks sucks. It is
bad and buggy. It is really painful if it is running an appliance that has to
work. The sooner managers get overworked programmers / engineers will lead to
bad things which might lead to lawsuits, the better.

I am hopeful that the Nest way of doing things is not replicated in their self
driving cars.

------
gluecode
I was a service provider during the initial days of launch and for two years
afterwards. Loved the people. They were driven to ship good looking products.
That was their downfall. At Nest they were (at least then) focused on how
things looked. Nobody cared about how it worked, or how the product should be
supported after shipping. Anyways, no regrets.

I met some of the best engineers and designers at Nest in the initial days.
Afterwards, it became a A quality hiring B and B hiring C. Left hand did not
know what the right was doing. The quality went down the drain. The management
was terrifyingly dictatorial, top-down. Everyone was preparing for a Tony
presentation/demo. They were afraid like kids do of the cruel headmaster.

I wish them nothing but the best.

------
maxaf
I've once worked for a startup run by a CEO with a bulging Steve Jobs complex.
I was miserable for four years, questioned my sanity often and almost wrecked
my family and my health. I feel deeply for all Nest employees; their continued
screaming misery is manifest in the poor quality of Nest products. Hopefully
they'll have the good sense to quit before all is lost.

------
rblatz
The past few days when I walk by my nest thermostat in the morning I've seen
an error saying that it isn't connected to my wireless network. When in fact
it is connected, and can be reached through the nest app on my phone.

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

~~~
letitleak
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..)

~~~
kuschku
Android? Security? Are you joking? In the past weeks, several independent
exploit chains from "App with no permissions" to "Bootloader takeover" have
been published.

Completely working on all versions except for Marshmallow, unpatchable on the
older devices due to Android’s update model.

It doesn’t matter what code you sign when literally any app could be a
rootkit.

Edit: Some of the chains are from the author of this post:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/42fxtg/android_medi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/42fxtg/android_mediaserver_privilege_escalation_from/)

~~~
letitleak
I'd not heard from no permissions, but as with a website, I still prefer
things with my signature correspond to things from me and are nice even if the
rest is a cesspool. Given these problems, I would seriously hope that the ~8
app makers I trust feel the same way.

------
AaronBBrown
I have had 3 Ecobee thermostats in my house for over 3 years. They have been
extremely reliable and have an API, so I can do all sorts of fun stuff with
them. Right now I'm working on hooking them up so my themostats change
settings when the house is empty based on the presence of family member phones
on our LAN.

~~~
swasheck
that's pretty neat. i just got an ecobee for my birthday and love it, so far.

------
quietplatypus
No one here has yet really considered the real elephant in the room:

Why does anyone need an "intelligent" thermostat, especially something as
overhyped and over-engineered as Nest is?

I never even remotely bought into the Nest hype from the very beginning. Ditto
on their smoke detectors.

At least, you stop being such a baby and turn the heat up or down by yourself.
Controversial, I know.

At most, you put your thermostat on an automatic schedule, which can be done
about a thousand different ways (timer circuit, dippy bird, microcontrollers
that have already been manufactured and tested in a million different ways by
more established companies).

~~~
brianwawok
So there are some gains. For example if it knows it is an extra sunny day and
its 11am, it could heat a little bit less and let sunlight so more. On the
other hand, more fancy is more to break.

~~~
discodave
No, a thermostat already solves that problem because it measures the
temperature of the house and adjusts the heat accordingly.

~~~
brianwawok
Example for the predict temperature component.

For example with honeywell: My house warms up to 70 degrees by 8 am, holds it
there for 2 hours, by 10am it shuts off as the sun takes over warming. By noon
it is 76 in my house and I am having to open windows to stay cool.

With nest: My house warms up to 70 by 8, but is allowed to drift down to 67 by
10am because it knows the sun is coming. Sure enough it does, and warms up to
73 naturally and for free by noon.

I not only saved 2 hours of running my furnace (8-10 am), I changed my max
delta from my desired temperature from 6 degrees to 3 degrees.

~~~
quietplatypus
Ah, got it. So it's able to take into account outside factors that more
efficiently get you to the target temperature. Okay, I see the value now.
Thanks for the explanation!

------
varunjuice
If you haven't seen this interview of Tony by Aaron Levie, it's good insight
into how Tony thinks. FWIW, more violent metaphors than I've heard in violent
movies.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsk3nagSDRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsk3nagSDRU)

------
frabcus
UK residents, British Gas's Hive is a good alternative to Nest here. No
attempt to magically learn, really well made hardware and apps.

The only software upgrade since I bought mine was a new "boost" button (turns
heating on for 1 or 2 hours), which was the only thing I'd really wanted
extra...

------
bakul
The 1st law of robotics: a robot must not do any harm to a human through its
action or allow harm through its inaction. The 2nd law of robotics: a robot
must obey an order given to it by a human, except when in conflict with the
first law.

Seems like the Nest thermostat isn't built to obey the above laws!

~~~
EdiX
Those are the old laws, the new law is "humans are stupid, algorithms know
better"

------
pfarnsworth
I think the Nest is okay, overpriced but nice-to-look-at thermostat. It's easy
to use and easy to set up, and I haven't had any problems yet. There are a few
failures, namely lack of access to data, which forced me to download the data
myself and store it, violating the 10-day rule but I don't care. I would love
for them to actually try to catch me.

The bigger failure is the Dropcam. The acquisition has made the product much
worse. The new Nest app is really slow and crashes all the time. Currently,
one of my $200 cameras won't connect to the wifi, and I no idea why, but I'm
so furious I don't care.

I hate to say this, but the entire acquisition was a complete failure.

------
discodave
For all those complaining about quality / bugs in Nest devices, here is a talk
that some Nest engineers gave at the 2015 Google Test Automation Conference.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIoAq2Mjjas&list=PLSIUOFhnxE...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIoAq2Mjjas&list=PLSIUOFhnxEiCWGsN9t5A-XOhRbmz54IS1&index=16)

So there is at least somebody trying to improve things! Also, I think it's
interesting to note that a company can produce buggy crap even while their
engineers are turning up to conferences and saying all the right things.

------
mojito
Terrible place. Did some work for them a few years ago. They hired a lot of
assholes that mirrored Tony's personality. Working with those people was the
worst. And Tony is a control freak which led to an insular group of yes men.
And they often ended up making costly or wasteful mistakes because good, calm,
knowledgeable people were not able to make effective decisions in the
defective culture around Tony.

They also treated vendors like crap which is like kicking a dog.

I hope they make some big changes.

------
bsg75
TL;DR - Micromanaging executive is over his head, and compensates by bulling
subordinates for his own shortcomings.

------
irascible
Nest is way overvalued. How can you screw up a thermostat or a webcam? Someone
is going to eat their lunch.

