We're hearing about troubles at Nest | Hacker News Reader

We're hearing about troubles at Nest

businessinsider.com

369 pointsmarvel_boy252 comments

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.

> 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 people don't have that agility to move - we are really privileged in that we don't have to put up for this.

I would second that. Not in SV, in London, but I had a similar experience with an abusive work environment.

Stayed way too long and some of my shares vested. Now they're worth some money on paper, but it wasn't worth it - my advice for anyone in a similar situation would be to get out as early as possible.

Although leaving early creates an incentive for the company to abuse their workers before their shares vest.

If enough people leave the shares will not be worth much anyway

Don't put value on shares vesting late when comparing offers, then.

Seriously? In London? Now that is intriguing.

...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.

Yep. Fuck all those companies.

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.

Nope. Someone at Google also was let go because they hired someone from Apple who came of their own volition.

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.

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

To abuse your metaphor a little bit not everyone has the ink or the paper to write a new meal ticket just like that.

This is a good point. I am mid career so I was able to find a great job somewhere else in literally days because I (ironically) worked at Google before Nest. Not everyone has that experience or personal network to be able to do that - I was profoundly lucky and I realize that.

The first time abuse happens, just walk out, have a laugh about it (it reflects on them not you), and find another gig.

With all due respect, why not look them directly in the eye and reply: "Don't speak to me that way" and wait?

That sort of response helps other employees see how inappropriate it is.

Agreed. And if the next thing out of their mouth is anything but an apology, then walk out.

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.

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.

UI eligibility varies state by state. Here in MA, the FAQ says: "if your employer is able to show that you were fired for deliberate misconduct or violation of a company rule, you may be disqualified."

My strong wager is that standing up for abusive management practice would not trigger the "violation of company rule" clause and an employer with a penchant for acting like a jerk is unlikely to fight such a UI claim.

http://www.mass.gov/lwd/unemployment-insur/resources/questio...

Sure, but the problem is that if the employer is really bad they will strongly deny any abusive behavior and insist the employee simply refused to follow reasonable orders. Does the employee have to sue to get that overturned, and how would they win if it is one person's word against another?

I can understand your response - that was the way I used to think as well.

Its harder when its real life, you are getting a paycheck literally from this person, and you are usually surrounded by sycophants who think this is perfectly normal.

I think that's simply not true. It's the "shortage of engineers" meme that just won't die.

While there may be a lot of tech companies in SV hiring (debatable--there are certainly lots of them _interviewing_, but hiring?) there are only so many Alphabets and Facebooks in the area. Outside of opportunities at companies like these, you'll have to sacrifice some "career and income stability" which the parent poster pointed out.

Definitely leave if you're being abused, but it would be foolish not to prepare for a salary hit and/or 3-6 months of joblessness.

There are no other good options.

You can complain but you will get forced out eventually for rocking the boat plus it may affect your reputation in the market place. You just need to do what everyone does. Grit your teeth, stay positive and plan your exit strategy to another company.

Any company that would look down on you negatively for speaking out about this treatment is one that deserves to miss out on talented engineers.

Indeed. It's a filter.

Somewhat related, I've been considering putting my birth year (IGY) at the top of my resume. I'd rather someone silently bitbucket my resume than show up for a useless interview.

I had to deal with similar kind of shit in the past. Just not worth it unless you can cash out in a short time. Too much of a toll on your health. Better to be paid 5-10% less if necessary and do something I enjoy in comfort. However I think most who work at Nest could easily switch to new jobs given their credentials.

However I think most who work at Nest could easily switch to new jobs given their credentials.

I dunno. "Yeah, you remember last January when you came home from work and your dog was frozen solid? That, uh... that was my code."

We could rise up and destroy those who do such things. I don't think anyone would shed a tear if this guy were to be kicked out of the company.

> face the income and career insecurity that comes with quitting

Get a firm job offer before you give your notice. You won't face any income uncertainty, and you'll have much more leverage while negotiating with potential new employers (unless let you it show that you're really desperate to leave your current gig).

> face the income and career insecurity that comes with quitting?

Next to zero chance of that for a developer in Silicon Valley. But don't think it doesn't happen to people in minimum wage jobs everywhere.

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.

Yes but I'm asking how. If you piss off your employees and they leave, how do you grow your business into a multibillion-dollar company?

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 could be assholes after we succeed, but that's a highly unlikely hypothetical.

I agree. I've seen a*holes who were nobodies, and they went nowhere. This is because he is Tony Fadell.

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.

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

> "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."

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.

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

"...you are now known as an asshole."

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

So rather than develop the interpersonal skills that would allow you to say those kinds of things without sounding like an asshole, you're just going to secretly record everyone you run into (which is something that will solidify you as an asshole), and have this video record of you being an asshole to people.

Speaking of the truth: Sterling lost his basketball team because of private recordings of him being a racist, not hearsay. Then he proceeded to dig a deeper hole publicly. That is: a lapel-camera would not have exonerated him.

Here's some advice, since you think you can take it. When striving to correct others: (a) Make sure you're actually correct (b) make sure you're doing it to reach a common goal, rather than to uplift yourself and (c) understand that a defensive reaction is not a weakness, it's an entirely normal human reaction, and try to empathize with the person as you deliver the hard news.

A lot of people think that others don't want to hear the truth, but it's not that. Most people want to know what's going on. What most people don't want to endure is the embarrassment of being wrong in front of someone -- which is an entirely different thing.

People get corrected on stuff all the time and take it in stride. It's when there is a blow to their ego or you're actually wrong that they get upset. So, you need to either make it clear it's not about them in particular (it usually isn't, hence the "common goal"), and even if it is, you need to make sure they know it's about making them better, not tearing them down. And, you have to be willing to consider counter-arguments -- that is, not pretend you are the sole arbiter of truth.

Bluntly stating an uncomfortable truth (or opinion!) with no quarter is not what people who seek the truth do, it is what people who want to be in control do.

> People who do that think they're saying something that someone needs to hear

... but usually they're saying something that they want to hear themselves say.

I heard it as: when you are brutally honest with someone, they will remember the brutality but not the honesty.

Could it be that the people that report to a Fadell/Jobs are very talented and are able to absorb the nastiness while motivating employees below them?

You could ask the same questions about abusive intimate relationships.

Cribbing from that "book"- Destroy their sense of self-confidence & self-worth. Pick 'em young- they are easier to fool. Give them brief moments of sunshine to make them hope it'll get better. Promises. Threats. General megalomania.

What book?

Like, playbook of running an abusive relationship. Figure of speech

> how do you grow your business into a multibillion-dollar company?

Many people will allow themselves to be abused at work without doing anything about it. They'll commiserate with their coworkers, or vent on Glassdoor, or fantasize about leaving, but without ever following through.

So some good ones leave, and the rest get ridden hard and work on weekends and stay late to make their managers happy and rich.

Because the net employee flux is positive. You have to be a total utter asshole to lose all your employees, it turns out (like, criminally abusive or just not pay them kind of bad). Being just a moderate asshole however tends to produce more work output from the employees you do manage to retain. So on balance its a win.

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.

How are we defining success? As raising capital and being acquired?

Success = selling hyped up "smart thermostat" for $3.2 billion

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.

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.

Sometimes companies can be successful in spite of their leadership, because they have people that care about the users and products working under those conditions.

I just imagine how much BETTER those companies could be with more positive leadership though. It's a waste.

If Nest is this way under a tyrant, imagine how it really COULD be, and how many more interesting things they could create.

If you really want to know, this is the book I'd suggest you start with:

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/042519...

It's by a guy who was a counselor for abusive men, often ones attending therapy as part of a court order. It is the single most astute book I have read. He spent more than a decade listening to people's bullshit, and in this book he breaks it down brilliantly. Particularly relevant to you are the sections on how abusive relationships benefit abusers and why the abused stay so long.

It happens because people allow it to happen.

I never met the man, but wasn't Steve Jobs famous for this too?

I've read supposed accounts where he sounded worse than Nest's management.

how did someone with such an abusive management style lead his company to success?

Lawrence Joseph Ellison has a reputation like that, and his company seems to have done OK.

Many successful companies are founded/led by sociopaths.

Also worked there, but not on hardware, and the crunch-ness was no better. It's also an org driven more by design and marketing than by QA and sound development and engineering. You always felt like you were failing and behind. It was a very discouraging experience.

1/5, would not recommend.

...and the Nest devices I recently purchased will be getting returned immediately.

Sounds like Tony Fadell has lost sight of what's important in life.

Thanks for sharing your experience. We, as a community, should point out these so-called "leaders" who build their fortune on the efforts of other people.

All leaders build their fortune on the efforts of other people, pretty much by definition.

With the difference that true leaders work on making others the future leaders.

Did anyone here work under him at Apple? I'm curious whether it was the same situation back then, or was better balanced by the rest of the management team, or if this is new thing.

Yeah, I did. He did shout at Apple too, and people in his software teams (ie, non-iOS iPods) did work ridiculous hours 7 days a week for months before each iPod shipped. It was less of an issue because less things went wrong, though.

IMO this was because Apple knew how to make hardware, generally, and hence things didn't go far off the rails - he got a lot of support from Apple.

However, Tony didn't know the first thing about software and appeared to assume that it was something you threw new grads at because they'd hammer at it until it got through QA. Each year the teetering pile of crap grew higher and harder to ship...

Now he's master of all he surveys, he's worked out that actually consistently delivering complex projects (which have rather more complex software than an iPod) is damn hard. Shouting is his reflex reaction when this doesn't go well.

Feel terrible reading this. Is rest of the Alphabet upper management completely oblivious to what is happening inside Nest? Don't they care? Isn't leadership about doing the right thing. If people are getting abused, Alphabet/Google better do something about it. I thought Alphabet took pride in the kind of leadership traits they support and want their leaders to embody. I am pretty sure a ton of current/ex-Googlers will be shell-shocked to hear stories like these. I think Nest employees should simply join core Google teams(search/ads/apps/chrome/new efforts) and put an end to their personal abuse.

Larry and the rest of the leadership should really look into how Nest is run internally and fix things. This cannot be the norm and status-quo. This is anti-thesis to being Googley, and I personally know a ton of current and Ex Googlers who will be ashamed and hurt to hear this kind of abuse at Alphabet/Google. I am sorry you had to endure this. I am happy you are in a much better place. I am happy for your family now.

[1 word edit for grammar]

My understanding (maybe wrong) was that the Alphabet changes made it really hard to move between the subsidiaries.

It depends on the subsidiary. My little corner maintains close ties with Google's engineering tools, job ladder, promotion process, etc. for the express purpose of enabling easier hires/transfers from Google. So really it's up to the subsidiary as to how they choose to behave.

You will probably not find it hard to believe that Nest made it sound impossible. :)

>"Fuck being Googley" (direct quote).

I'd probably get fired for bursting out laughing.

Secretly and relentlessly put googly eyes on everything he owns.

This was down voted but I think it adds to the discussion.

Even in the "utopia" of SV (as some people seem to see it) boss can say something a mile over the line to Google executives and come out fine, but if an employee so much as puts a toe over.. it's almost like behind the hype we have the same bureaucracies and cultures as everyone else...

TGIF?

Google's weekly all-hands

"Thank Goodness It's Friday". Although, interestingly enough, it's on Thursdays so people in APAC can take part.

Do you think this contributed to the lackluster software upgrade/update cycle. To be clear，I'm not blaming you but it sure seems that Nest has had significant challenges rolling out software updates (I'm a Nest user)

Well, that bodes ill for Google Glass coming back from its "hibernation". It changes the interpretation of why they moved it to be under him: it looks like a punishment for their failure.

I hate to say this, but I felt the same way at "Accenture".

I really miss Pud at fuckedcompany.com. He was always railing against moronic companies like Accenture. He'd write something like "Accenture (pronounced ass-enter)".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

I second your opinion about Tony Fadell. Worked indirectly on few projects he managed. Disgusting human being always looking at profits and cutting corners.

I recall one phone-meeting with engineer where he praised her for 10 minutes how great her programming skills were and how he "looks forward for many more years of working together". When the conversation was over, on the same breath, he told us (team of 5 in the meeting): "we need to replace her immediately - she's too expensive!". We looked at each other and felt really stupid. I don't think anyone of us ever been in such situation...

Jesus. Cost cutting with engineers never works well.

Suits need to get out of the thinking that engineers/developers/designers are a liability to be minimised.

It's not just suits either, it seems to be most non-engineers, I've met people looking for web designers before and they've tried to go with the most cut rate designer they can find, and then they wonder why their websites look like shit.

I never saw that at Apple. There were literally no budget restrictions on engineering as long as you got the job done.

Was that back in pre-Apple days?

I get the mental image of a wannabe Steve Jobs loudmouth running rampant without the slightest hint that he's building a fucking thermostat and he's really not that consequential in the grand scheme of things.

Maybe you just needed to leave the Nest?

Eggzactly what I was thinking.

Same, worst 1 year of my life working. And the problem isn't just Tony but a lot of his direct reports are really really bad. The real irony is hearing Tony say the company has a no asshole policy and that he wants Nest to not have assholes like Apple did. Fail. Fuck Nest and Larry.

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.

Are you sure that an ordinary thermostat "turns your heater on" right away? I know that my furnace, regardless of thermostat, doesn't audibly "turn on" right away. The burners fire up right away (which you can only hear if you're standing next to the furnace) and then the blower turns on some minutes later. In the summer, the Nest turns on the air conditioning unit right away.

Oh definitely, because I'm not just standing there waiting for it to turn on immediately. There have been times when we're freezing, and I tell my wife "just turn the temperature all the way up" and then she says "I did a while back" and when I go to check, it's on 90. So we're talking 20 mins having passed and the heating unit barely coming alive, when in reality it should be on the whole time attempting to heat up to 90.

I had a similar issue, but it's because I had setup the nest incorrectly. It asked about my equipment and about my setup, and I got it wrong. So when it would try to turn on the heat it would not turn the blower on. Once I fixed the configuration error it works instantly.

Thanks, I'll check this out. I had mine professionally installed, so I generally trust the company that did it, but always good to double check.

I set mine up myself (easy setup was a perk I noticed when buying it a few years ago) and in the application, there are several details you want to fill out on initial setup. A big one is the type of heating/cooling you have in your house because it adjusts behavior in response. Over time it "learns" the quirks of your setup such as how responsive it is and adjusts to compensate. At least that's how it's supposed to work and how mine works. The "90 minutes" or "2 hours" or whatever it shows is supposed to be based on its estimate based on how it's modeled your house's hvac setup.

Mine at least correctly controls the furnace, but the one feature I bought it for -- a thermostat I can control from my iPhone -- barely works. Their app has gone downhill with every single release, and it's at least half the time that I get a message saying it can't connect.

Your comments are worrying, but match a disappointing number of other users.

When I was ready to switch to a programmable thermostat to save money, I really, really wanted to like the Nest. It was cool, whizzbang, etc., etc. But then I started reading the 1-star reviews on Amazon, and the support forums. And it worried me. People came home to apartments that were 90* because their heaters were stuck on full blast during the summer. All sorts of people bought $300 Nests, only to discover their 8-year-old equipment was apparently not compatible with it. People spoke of Nests being fried by voltage surges in "old" (a scant 4 years!) HVAC systems. EEs were comparing the Nest's voltage regulators to that of a generic $20 thermostat and finding the generic more reliable in every aspect.

Nervous that my 14-year-old system would annihilate a very expensive toy, and that my wife staying at home would make the thing pointless, regardless, I bought a $100 Wifi Honeywell with a traditional 7-day calendar. It's fantastic. I expected very little from Honeywell, who I regard as a quaint, old-skool company, but their Android and web apps are simply excellent. Easy to use, well-designed, and it just works. I saved about $120 in utility bills in the first 8 months I had it, living in the nebulous division of the continental climate and humid subtropical climate in the midwest.

When we moved to San Diego to a house with only central heat, no AC, I still dropped $70 on the same thermostat just to have access to the "what temperature is it in my house right now" feature.

I currently have non-Wi-Fi programmable thermostats. I have no experience with Nest directly, but from the description of how it determines when to turn the temp up or down I don't see how it would be that "smart" for me. I work from home, but my office is nowhere near the downstairs thermostat. So any motion detection it might do would assume that nobody is home, when I in fact am.

On the other hand, my simple Honeywell thermostats do wonderfully because I can program them to my actual schedule and only need to adjust things twice a year. Sure, it's probably not as efficient as a dynamic algorithm, but I'd rather to do this than worry about waking up freezing in the middle of the night, or worse, having my condenser unit fried by an over-eager thermostat by starting/stopping it constantly.

I am thinking of getting something Wi-Fi compatible though because setting the temp from my phone would be really nice. Too bad not many work with multi-zone systems.

The Nest thermostats do let you set a schedule manually. I set that up a long time ago because their "smart" algorithm was pure garbage.

> On the other hand, my simple Honeywell thermostats do wonderfully because I can program them to my actual schedule and only need to adjust things twice a year. Sure, it's probably not as efficient as a dynamic algorithm, but I'd rather to do this than worry about waking up freezing in the middle of the night, or worse, having my condenser unit fried by an over-eager thermostat by starting/stopping it constantly.

That's my big problem with Nest. A basic programmable thermostat with manual override and a delayed blower feature is probably an 85% solution. Machine learning on top of that, for a single-family residence, is ridiculous overkill for very little gain.

Agreed. I am actually more excited about the air vents with built-in thermostats. I have a few rooms that get very hot/cold, so that would be a better solution than a single point of measurement. Also, I think Insteon has a thermostat that can take temperature measurements from several rooms via wireless sensors. No idea how well it works, but I like the sound of that.

Even the basic nonprogrammable Honeywell digital thermostat is smarter than most people realize. It is actually monitoring how well the system has been working and planning ahead so that it will not cycle too fast or switch over to the second fuel source unnecessarily. They have put a lot of thought into these.

Agreed. I thought that feature was fascinating, it worked extremely well. The Honeywell in my midwest home did a perfect job of learning how long the 17-year-old furnace took to heat up the house in the mornings.

The heat was set to go back to the daytime temperatures at 6 AM, and I began to wake up at about 5:47 every morning when, like clockwork, the furnace kicked on to reach 64 degrees before I rolled out of bed. Well played, Honeywell engineers.

>I expected very little from Honeywell, who I regard as a quaint, old-skool company.

Honeywell has been in business for 110 years. If you are in business that long you gotta be doing something right! I would assume.

I often assume companies that old are succeeding in large part due to enterprise partnership inertia: the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" outlook, applied to whatever enterprise customers they happen to serve. If the majority of their profits do turn out to come from individual consumers rather than enterprises, though, then I feel a bit more sanguine about age as a positive signifier.

How long has Comcast been around for?

I have a $60 no name generic z-wave thermostat that when paired to my Wink Hub (could be any z-wave compatible hub though) I get nearly all of the functionality of Nest with none of the headaches. It runs on a schedule I define instead of some magical algorithm, I can get all the alerts I want in a unified interface (the Wink app on my phone), and I can monitor the temp in my house or turn it on/off remotely when I leave for vacation. More importantly, it's never not worked for any reason.

People came home to apartments that were 90 because their heaters were stuck on full blast during the summer.

When I was in grad school, I wired a temperature controller to an experiment, set it, satisfied myself that it was working OK, and went away. Guess what. The relay failed, and the heater was stuck on, until it melted the experiment.

As a grad student in physics (not even EE or embedded systems), I could chalk it up to a beginner mistake.

But if you design a commercial product that controls the release of large amounts of energy, you can't make beginner mistakes. There many not be many remaining reasons why age and experience are valuable traits in a engineer, but this is one of them. Germane to one of the other comments, this may also be why a 110 year old company still has a reason to exist.

I have actually owned both, a nest and a wifi honeywell. Pros and cons to both. My biggest gripe to nest is that it was focused on saving energy, and did not offer any way to tweak some of the settings. Yes it may be cheaper to let the temp get 3 degrees over what I set it before you turn the AC on, but having 5 degree temp swings every hour is not a very comfortable environment..

The honeywell is simple, but works well. Has a vacation mode, and tells my kids how warm or cold it is outside.. cool!

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 (warning: loud alarms in video)

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.

This is why I like the FirstAlert wireless detectors: mesh network so they all go off, but you program each one to announce with a voice which room the trouble is in. They even announce which one has the low battery instead of chirping in the middle of the night.

Well much of that was the "dream" of the nest protects...

It announces where the "alert" is, you can wave to dismiss it, it has the app for your phone to alert you if you are away from home, and they all link together (without needing any wiring in the house, making it easy to retrofit).

Sadly in practice it's a mess, nothing works, so much so that I've lost all confidence in the product to do it's minimal function, detect smoke...

It's a bit ridiculous when you could have basically taken any old mass produced el-cheapo smoke detector circuit, and instead of tripping an alarm have it just feed into gpio pins on some wifi/whatever controller that has the "smarts".

Literally all that was needed to get 100% of the reliability of the billions of detectors out on the market, while working out all the kinks on the "cloudy" sort of stuff.

I have to admit I re-invent the wheel more than I should, but man. This one seems simple :)

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?

the team consists of a bunch of industrial designers and *hitty electronic engineers?

Because they're disrupting thermostats.

Success.

Here is what I think is a sane timeline:

(1) smoke detector in kitchen goes off, only sets off in kitchen

(2) after 1 minute, other rooms start saying "smoke in kitchen"

(3) after 2 minutes, alarm goes off in other rooms

Timeline could be shortened if necessary for safety, but this doesn't seem like it would be difficult to implement.

> 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." Not once have I been able to turn off an alarm without removing the batteries.

I'm surprised you were a protect owner and didn't hear about wave to silence being disabled completely: https://nest.com/support/article/Nest-Protect-Safety

Many of us bought ours before the patch...unfortunately.

When I see that video, I now understand why there exists a Twitter account called Internet of Shit.

https://twitter.com/internetofshit

Never understood why in US the smoke detectors are such a nightmare. I never had a problem in Europe.

I also never had one in Europe outside of the UK.

True. Although you have to count that in US most buildings are made of wood and drywall, and not with Austrian or Swiss fire-proofing standards.

Mandatory in France nowadays..

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 !

I guess I never will understand the reason for buying any tech gadget when the current solution is operating within parameters.

> 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.

This is both hilarious and horrible from my point of view reading this

They will replace them if you ask.

I had a similar issue with our Gen 1 Nest Protects and false alarms. After talking to tech support, they replaced all of them with Gen 2 units. They actually replaced them twice as the first set of replacements were stolen from my doorstep.

I actually chose a competing product, the Sensi Thermostat from Emerson, after reading so many complaints like this. While it doesn't have the fancy learning capabilities of the Nest, it does have full scheduling capability, which I actually prefer. The mobile apps work great, and I've even written some small utilities to monitor their API so I can get some email alerts on certain interesting events. Aside from a couple small outages with the mobile app / website, I've had zero problems with the HVAC functions.

> I've even written some small utilities to monitor their API

Is their API local to the unit or "in the cloud?"

Looks like it's yet another cloud one based on the code here [0].

[0]: https://github.com/mguterl/sensi/blob/master/index.js

Unfortunately it is cloud based (signalr), so if they decide to close the service, my Wi-Fi thermostat becomes a basic programmable thermostat. I haven't yet sniffed the traffic between the thermostat and their servers to see if it would be possible to replace their service with my own.

Not sure if it's the same problem, but a few months after getting my Nest it started ignoring my adjustments as well.

After some investigation, I found that it had automatically set up a bunch of temperature schedules without my knowledge (I guess it thought it was smart and could learn my weekly patterns from my past usage). That's all fine if it actually cared to take my manual adjustments more seriously than trusting its own "intelligence," but I'm pretty sure it just thought my adjustments were irrelevant suggestions :)

Anyway, after clearing all the schedules that it added (and turning off auto-schedule in the settings), it now works as I would expect.

In my experience it will re-add those schedules. I've cleared them out several times now.

Looks like there's a setting (at least in the web interface) to turn off auto-schedule. Apparently I had turned it off for one of my Nest thermostats, but not the other one - turning it off now.

> That's all fine if it actually cared to take my manual adjustments more seriously than trusting its own "intelligence," but I'm pretty sure it just thought my adjustments were irrelevant suggestions :)

And this has been my problem with all of Google's products. They can be really smart, but when I want to override something, they treat that as irrelevant.

The apartment we are renting has a Nest. And it just reeks of solution looking for a problem to me. I've never felt like the Nest is an improvement over what it's replacing.

It hit me when I was in bed and wanted to turn the heat up, so I grabbed my phone and launched the Nest app. Not sure what segment of the network was having issues, but it wouldn't connect to the thermostat. After about 3 minutes of fiddling, I got up, turned the heat up on the thermostat itself, and went back to bed. The whole situation was just really dumb.

Yeah, I really don't get value of the Nest either. I'd rather just program my schedule myself and have some certainty about it, rather than let some algorithm try to guess.

The only smart thermostat feature that's at all tempting to me is the Ecobee's remote sensors (which the Nest doesn't have). I've lived in places where uneven heating is a legitimate problem.

Not everyone has a set schedule like that, though.

Yeah, but I assume it would be even worse at learning those. To handle non-set schedules it would really need to be more reactive, with more sensor data that I believe it actually has.

> with more sensor data that I believe it actually has.

I missed the edit window: I meant "with more sensor data than I believe it actually has."

> remote sensors (which the Nest doesn't have)

Maybe each Nest is a remote sensor, and everyone who has one has their house temperature set to the same temp, the result of some super-duper averaging algorithm running on Nest's cloud.

I've had a Nest for a few years now and it's been pretty good for my uses so far. I can manually set a schedule but I also have the option of just adjusting it as I see fit and letting the Nest "learn" my schedule if I choose.

Additionally, it's pretty good at handling things when I'm not around to manually tweak things or something changes. If I'm off one day during the week it detects that I'm at home and doesn't fall back to the "away" schedule/settings and on the flip side, if I'm away at work or somewhere else, when I start my drive home, it can start heating or cooling early so the temp is where I want it when I arrive.

It's definitely a bit "gee whiz" but so far I've had no glaring issues with it but I've had several positive ones. My main feature request is the one you mentioned with the remote sensors. I'd love to see them come up with little night-light-sized "Nest Eggs" that you can plug into outlets in different rooms, maybe act as "smart" outlets for whatever you plug into the Nest Egg (my imaginary term, not a real product) in order to manage non-smart lighting or other minor appliances, and help build a more accurate heating/cooling model of the house.

If I was working at Nest that would definitely be the new product I'd be pushing for.

The machine controls you -- exactly, isn't that what Google is all about?

It's always fascinating (and disappointing) to me to read stories like this. I have had two Nest thermostats in my house for three years now, and I regularly think of them as the single best upgrade we made when we moved in. Ours work great, and provide a far better experience than the old-style programmable thermostats we had in our previous places. I don't know if we just got lucky, or what. I wish that everyone could have the same experience we have, because for us it really is a great product...

I had a similar experience. When I first got them, they worked great in the summertime. No complaints. But they were bloody awful for me in the winter:

* Nest would, randomly, refuse to turn on AUX heat. I woke up one morning and my house was in the upper 50s (the set temperature was 68) and Nest was just sitting there trying to run the heat pump instead of turning on AUX when it wasn't keeping up. At first I thought there was something wrong with my HVAC system, but I've had two different people look my system over, on three different occasions, and found everything working properly. Nest was just refusing to turn on AUX.

The first time it happened it was in the single digits outside and Nest let my house get into the upper 50s (temperature was set at 68, and it was still trying to run the heat pump even though it was in the single freaking digits outside). I finally took Nest off the wall and manually shorted the aux heat on - I didn't want the house to get any colder while we "troubleshooted" it, and Nest was just refusing, no matter how I adjusted it, to turn the aux heat on and warm the house back up.

* Other times, it would use AUX when it doesn't need it. It was 37 outside once, and nest was burning AUX like crazy when the heat pump was having no problems keeping up. I had a nearly $400 power bill that January. Now, in fairness, it was very cold that month, but Nest using AUX when it shouldn't was a big contributor.

For awhile they wouldn't even let you set an AUX lockout lower than 35! There was a complicated "hack" you could go through that involved juggling the thermostat and the smartphone app and taking advantage of some timing flaw to set it lower. The most recent update in November or December allowed you to set a lower lockout, but the gremlin returned and Nest would be burning my AUX heat again when it was 40 outside.

How did I finally solve this? For now, until there's a better solution, I;ve set my location to somewhere 50 miles south. Really.

* They are very difficult to troubleshoot. At the time there was no way to manually turn on AUX, even to test if it's working. The only way we were able to test it is to take the thing off the wall and manually short the wires together (and, of course, it worked fine).

This is not some weird setup either. It's a standard heat pump with electric heat strips for aux heat, that's only about 5 years old. Where I live, this is the absolute most common form of heating. Because I can take the thermostat off the wall and short the wires together to turn aux on (and because I've had two different HVAC contractors check my system), I'm fairly certain the problem is not my HVAC system.

The biggest problem was, after three times of waking up to a cold house, I had a very difficult time trusting them. I had an infant in the house, and for something that I'm not supposed to have to think about, I was spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about.

So at one point I replaced one of them with a Honeywell (not the Lyric, one of the touchscreen models). And it worked fine for the rest of winter and was much less crazy to deal with, but once summer rolled around the Honeywell wouldn't turn my air conditioning on! In troubleshooting it, we found that the Honeywell was defective and wasn't putting enough voltage to activate the reversing valve. So the heat pump was still running.

So I ended up putting the Nest back on for the summer, but spent a lot of time reading the Nest forums. Apparently problems with AUX heat are SUPER common with Nests (just Google "nest aux heat" to see tons of complaints).

I'm still very wary of them. If I wake up to a cold house again, they are going right in the trash can and I'm getting another Honeywell or an ecobee3. I like being able to monitor and control from my phone or the web, but not at the cost of having to constantly worry about either my house getting too cold at night or a $400 power bill.

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.

It sounds like your Nest is broken or is not installed properly.

(The installation can be tricky; I put mine in myself and did it wrong at first because the existing wiring was mislabeled)

You're just 1 data point, but my data point is that my 2 Nests work absolutely fine, with the sole exception that they seem (lately?) to be too aggressive in turning down the heat when we're here and not aggressive enough in turning it off when we're not (did it used to be smarter at this?)

I like the ability to control them from the app as well as the Nest Report I get every month.

Polar opposite of my experience. My nest was easy to install and has worked perfectly ever since. It does do a +15 minutes if I adjust, but that is just telling me it will take that amount of time to change the temperature e.g. the temp is set to 65 but I change it to 70 and it will say +15 meaning it will take 15 minutes to get from 65 to 70.

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.)

> it fails spectacularly at the ONE thing it's supposed to do, which is to let us set a comfortable temperature for our house.

Is that the one this it's supposed to do? I thought it's main feature was to be connected to the internet. Why you'd want that I have no idea.

I have about as cheap a programmable as you can get. It has four time ranges per day. I set them for morning, away, evening, sleep. It always works, all the time. If I come home and it's cold, or if I'm up late and it's cold, I hit the button a few times and go back to the couch.

It always works. Always. Always.

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?

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.

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.

That's a workaround of IFTTT limits not Nest

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

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

If you're an iOS user, check out Skylark. Does up to five devices for geofencing. My partner and I have it, and when both of our devices are outside the fence, it goes Away. When one ones back in, it comes Home.

> It would be trivial for the thermostat to figure out if your phone is connected to your home network

Which is exactly what the Honeywell Lyric thermostat does (albeit with geofencing) and it works great. My dad has a Nest, and I knew it would never work for me - my schedule is too erratic. I got the Lyric and I love it. The model of how it sets up triggers is also very simple to understand:

(some event occurs) -> (set thermostat temp)

where "some event occurs" can be a scheduled time of day, or tapping a button in the app, or the first person's phone arrives at home, or the last person's leaves, and "set thermostat temp" can be + or - some number of degrees, or set to an "away" temp.

Since I have 3 of the Lyrics, it also makes it possible to keep some areas of the house at a different temp. E.g. just tap one button and the "bedrooms" section of the house goes to a good sleep temp, while the other sections go to "away" mode. Another trigger turns everything to a good temp ~30 mins before my scheduled wake up time.

I've always wondered if sometimes it's worth it to keep the furnace/AC on. And if so, at what point is it worth keeping it on?

I figure it's a bit like the car ignition where if you're stopped for more than x seconds, it's worth it to turn the car off. Is it like that with heating/cooling? I wonder if so, if we'll have a Thermostat that'll tell us "no it's better for you to keep it on rather than stop for the amount of time you're wanting to turn it off for"...

Anyone got helpful numbers/anecdotes?

Furnaces shouldn't excessively "short-cycle" but what that means depends on a lot of factors. You can read a bit, e.g. here:

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/appliances-gadgets/2713-minimu...

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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".

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.

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.

> 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?

Well, lemme think...

2012, October. I, an American from upstate NY, am traveling on the Queen Elizabeth Way to visit a friend in Toronto, a city I last saw at the age of 3. There are at least 6 lanes on the highway, packed with drivers so cantankerous and forceful that save for the autumn gray I could swear I was in LA.

I'm approaching the city and a display by the road says the route is closed for construction. My maps app redirects me to another highway, which is completely closed after 15 miles of driving. Another redirect, all while forcing my way through the automobile equivalent of a massive hockey team.

Suffice to say, I didn't know the city, and I didn't have the chance to unfold a map.

The only part that was out of my control was the $300 in roaming charges.

Ah but I bet that the animations were beautiful and the icons all lined up perfectly

This was iOS6 Maps...

How did you survive ?

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?

Depends if you like talking to people IRL

(Disclaimer: I usually don't)

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.

Did Socrates actually say that or was it just something Plato had him say in his book?

We can't tell for sure, but it teaches us something, and that's the best we can hope for.

Socrates also taught that we should fight to kill democracy because it effectively means that the state is not run according to what is "morally right", but instead is run by idiots who don't think they're idiots.

Socrates also claims the fact that his students overthrew the government and implemented this idea of governing by "moral right" and proceeded to kill thousands of people. He claims that the fact that they did so had nothing to do with him.

i addressed your seeming confusion on the subject in another thread.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11109040

I hate IOT too, but I love smart devices. The answer I see to smart things: manual overrides, and no phone-home requirements. Give the control back to the user.

If I put up a smart device, and someone breaks into my network, that's on me. If google screws up my house, that's on them, and they should be held liable.

that seems an egregious misreading of the parable:

    At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a 
    famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird 
    which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he 
    was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic 
    and calculation and geometry and astronomy and 
    draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the 
    use of letters. 

    Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the 
    whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great 
    city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian 
    Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. 
    To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring 
    that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the 
    benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired 
    about their several uses, and praised some of them and 
    censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. 

    It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus 
    said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. 
    But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will 
    make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; 
    it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. 
    
    Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or 
    inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the 
    utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users 
    of them. 
  
    And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, 
    from a paternal love of your own children have been led 
    to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; 
    for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness 
    in the learners' souls, because they will not use their 
    memories; they will trust to the external written 
    characters and not remember of themselves. 

    The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to 
    memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples 
    not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be 
    hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; 
    they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know 
    nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of 
    wisdom without the reality.

from Plato's Phaedrus(o)

much different than claiming Socrate's criticised reading and writing

it's a parable, and one i read as intending to warn people of technology's ability to encourage the thinking that one can inform without comprehending

memory without understanding

mastery without failure

this reading allows for readers to be able to ask questions

(o) http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html

timely..

"On this day (February 15) 2415 years ago, Socrates was sentenced to death by people of Athens. "

https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/45wefo/on_this_...

We should really get rid of those myths. Yes Socrates was executed. Yes he was teaching students philosophy/science (there was no difference in antiquity). The guy who told his story was a student of his, a big fan of him, and absolutely did not agree with the judgement of the people, but there's a huge but here:

You may want to google "thirty tyrants" and read a bit and you'll quickly see there's more to the story. The claim is that Socrates was executed for constantly criticizing the state, for putting science and philosophy/ethics ahead of the interests of the state, and thereby corrupting youth and his students. That, taken in 20th century context sounds bad, really, really bad. However, here's what they meant by that statement : not once but twice the people he taught tried to overthrow the state. You see, Socrates hated democracy with a passion, to the point that he advocated using mass violence and killing to end it.

One of these coup attempts by his students succeeded and proceeded to execute >5% of the total population of Athens in a little over a year for various imagined offences. One of the tyrants, their leader if they had any, a relative and pupil of Socrates is described as "determined to remake the city and kill democracy whatever the cost in lives". While Socrates distanced himself from their actions, and even managed to make enemies of some of them, there's good reason to believe he was involved.

When the tyrants were overthrown, democracy was reinstated, and Socrates was left unpunished on condition of not teaching anymore. It didn't take him a week to violate this condition, and once again he raged against the state and it didn't take long for his students to attempt yet another coup. Shortly after that coup attempt was thwarted, again with loss of life, he was executed, right after his students who attempted the coup and survived were.

Socrates was a man who believed, taught and fought for the idea that "those in the moral right" (and he meant him and his students) should control all of society, and he kept fighting for it after having demonstrated what happened (ie. the killing of >5% of Athens).

Was this guy executed "for his defense of science" ? No. He was a dangerous lunatic that actually managed to organize an armed force that successfully (for a time) tried to implement his view of a "morally correct" society by mass murder.

what myths are you referring to?

it may be more help to link sources that support your conclusions

i admit a lack of historical context to many texts i have read and my only exposure to 'the thirty' is through plato without any supplemental research of my own on the subject so my prejudices are his

because of this i did as you suggested and did a search for 'thirty tyrants' and i only found material that conflicted and confused your comment as here stated

from the wiki(o):

    Due to their desire to remain in complete control 
    over Athens, the Thirty sought to exile or kill anyone
    who outwardly opposed their regime. Socrates was one of
    the several citizens who chose to oppose the oligarchy,
    and with that opposition came the endangerment of his life.

which appears to state the opposite of what you claimed

also from the wiki you can see that the leader of the thirty, critias, was indeed a former pupil of socrates, but the relationship seems to have ended and as such noting critias was a pupil of socrates seems to be judging the teacher for the ills of the student

plato talks about the thirty a number of times..

from his seventh letter(i):

    In my youth I went through the same 
    experience as many other men. I fancied
    that if, early in life, I became my own 
    master, I should at once embark on a 
    political career. 
    
    And I found myself confronted with the 
    following occurrences in the public 
    affairs of my own city. The existing 
    constitution being generally condemned, 
    a revolution took place, and fifty-one men 
    came to the front as rulers of the 
    revolutionary government, namely eleven in 
    the city and ten in the Peiraeus-each of 
    these bodies being in charge of the market 
    and municipal matters-while thirty were 
    appointed rulers with full powers over 
    public affairs as a whole. 
    
    Some of these were relatives and acquaintances 
    of mine, and they at once invited me to share 
    in their doings, as something to which I had 
    a claim. The effect on me was not surprising 
    in the case of a young man. 
    
    I considered that they would, of course, so 
    manage the State as to bring men out of a bad 
    way of life into a good one. So I watched them 
    very closely to see what they would do. 
    
    And seeing, as I did, that in quite a short time 
    they made the former government seem by comparison 
    something precious as gold-for among other things 
    they tried to send a friend of mine, the aged 
    Socrates, whom I should scarcely scruple to describe 
    as the most upright man of that day, with some other 
    persons to carry off one of the citizens by force to 
    execution, in order that, whether he wished it, or not, 
    he might share the guilt of their conduct; but he 
    would not obey them, risking all consequences in 
    preference to becoming a partner in their iniquitous 
    deeds-seeing all these things and others of the same 
    kind on a considerable scale, I disapproved of their 
    proceedings, and withdrew from any connection with 
    the abuses of the time.

here we have a politically minded plato with a sudden opportunity to become a politician because his friends, socratic pupil associations, and family just performed a coup on what was considered a generally reviled existing governing body

but decided to wait a bit and found his reluctance supported as they quickly became tyrants making the previously reviled government 'seem by comparison something precious as gold'

then he goes on to recount how socrates put himself at great risk to refuse to gather dissidents for execution

a story that plato recounts in socrates' apology(ii) in first person through socrates:

    But when the oligarchy of the Thirty was in power,
    they sent for me and four others into the rotunda, 
    and bade us bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis, 
    as they wanted to execute him. 
    
    This was a specimen of the sort of commands which 
    they were always giving with the view of implicating 
    as many as possible in their crimes; and then I 
    showed, not in words only, but in deed, that, if I 
    may be allowed to use such an expression, I cared 
    not a straw for death, and that my only fear was the 
    fear of doing an unrighteous or unholy thing. 
    
    For the strong arm of that oppressive power did not 
    frighten me into doing wrong; and when we came out 
    of the rotunda the other four went to Salamis and 
    fetched Leon, but I went quietly home. 
    
    For which I might have lost my life, had not the 
    power of the Thirty shortly afterwards come to an 
    end. And to this many will witness.

so according to plato, and apparently many who will bear witness, socrates refused a call from the thirty to execute one who spoke against their tyranny

from salamis' wiki(iii):

    From these texts, it is clear that Leon of Salamis 
    had an honorable reputation, he was put to death by 
    the Thirty, and his execution was publicly recognized 
    as unjust and unwarranted.

and a widely believed wrongful execution at that

investigating your claims has found me wholly opposing conclusions

i am indifferent to the righteousness of socrates the man but your slander stands unsupported

there is plenty in plato that could be argued the work of lunacy but i am unable to find your purported support for this tyranny

this quote from the apology(ii) is one of my favourites:

    Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a 
    disgraceful sort of ignorance? And this is the point 
    in which, as I think, I am superior to men in general, 
    and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than 
    other men, - that whereas I know but little of the 
    world below, I do not suppose that I know

i free myself from thinking i know that which i am without knowledge of

(o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Tyrants

(i) http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/seventh_letter.html

(ii) http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

(iii) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_of_Salamis

You have most of the data there. I think you just need to read through it again. You will find that Socrates taught the thirty tyrants, that he was a fierce enemy of democracy (which was most definitely not a reviled body at the time, unless you mean reviled by Socrates and his pupils. It was generally agreed that the democracy was less effective than "something else", but very little agreement on which exact "something else" would be better. For Socrates, morals, as defined by the philosophers (ie. him) was superior).

It is true that a while after the coup had happened Socrates at one point refused to cooperate with them. But what happened there was that he made an enemy of one (or perhaps more) of the thirty tyrants, who then challenged him to bring Leon of Salamis for execution (which, to me seems to indicate he was part of the thirty tyrants government, but that isn't the general interpretation). Shortly after that the thirty tyrants were overthrown.

Next there was a decision by the new government, that Socrates was not directly guilty, but was never to teach again, never to have students again. He immediately violated it, and after a while there was another incident by his students against the state. They were executed and immediately after so was Socrates.

My issue is that while Socrates getting executed "for teaching science", while technically correct, fails to mention that his teaching of science was closely related to a mass murder that happened in Athens, followed by him committing an immediate violation of the outcome of a "court case", which was clearly related to yet another incident, an attack on "parliament".

Would you have let Socrates continue his teaching after such events, after one in 20 of the people you knew got executed by his students, and he is involved in an attempt to repeat that experience ? Whilst of course the decision to execute him does not pass a 21st century moral test, don't you think that if this happened in America today that he would disappear behind bars for a few decades ? It is hard, I think, to argue the case that Socrates should have gone free here.

I feel leaving this critical context out does disrespect to the story and paints a wholly wrong picture of both who Socrates was and even to an extent leaves out critical context when it comes to his teachings. Socrates believed in there being one correct answer to any and all questions (maybe unknown, but still a singular correct answer, a grand truth), to be provided by philosophers, that had to be imposed on everyone. His disagreement with the thirty tyrants was not the manner of their governing, but the content.

again, i am indifferent to the righteousness of socrates the man

    he was a fierce enemy of democracy

[citation needed] seriously, what are you talking about? democracy the idea? dare i say democracy's platonic ideal? if i oppose a democracy's policy does that mean i oppose democracy?

    (which was most definitely not a reviled body at the
    time, unless you mean reviled by Socrates and his pupils

[citation needed] show me a source that states the pretyrant governing body that was overthrown that plato states was 'generally condemned' was in truth 'generally accepted'?

    Would you have let Socrates continue his teaching 
    after such events, after one in 20 of the people 
    you knew got executed by his students

well, yes, but that is because i support freedom of speech

if you want to make it an argument of militanism then i suppose you would have to show that all of these people were students of socrates, stead solely the one noted as critias, and further that their efforts were weaponised from ideas which were planted and sowed by socrates

what things did socrates teach these people that you would actively censor from the public forum?

    Socrates believed in there being one correct 
    answer to any and all questions (maybe unknown,
    but still a singular correct answer, a grand 
    truth), to be provided by philosophers, that had 
    to be imposed on everyone.

[citation needed] also, if you can explain, if this even were the case, how it demonstrably leads to killing?

    I feel leaving this critical context out does 
    disrespect to the story and paints a wholly wrong
    picture

can you cite the context i left out? if i did, it was completely unintended and i encourage any greater context you can lend

i take grave issue with your editorial exposition

stop telling people how they should think and offer up the sources that led you to your conclusions and let people think for themselves

    Would you have let Socrates continue his teaching 
    after such events, after one in 20 of the people 
    you knew got executed by his students

  well, yes, but that is because i support freedom of speech

If you consider that reasonable then perhaps we simply have a huge difference of opinion here. I would put forward that a hell of a lot of people would object to teaching an ideology after that same group committed mass murder. And by object I mean mobs would hunt them down and kill them (which is pretty much what happened).

  also, if you can explain, if this even were the case, how it demonstrably leads to killing?

It obviously led to killings in that period of history of Athens. Whether this was solely the fault of the ideology, or the man is an open question that cannot ever be answered to any modern standard. In that particular piece of history, however, most people would obviously consider it true, for they just saw the ideology's adherents do it before their very eyes.

The standard you're using, innocent until proven guilty, is a standard that would only make it's first appearance in law 6 centuries after these events ... so I would say that applying such a standard here is not a reasonable judgement to make. These people worked from the principle that the majority of free men is always right. The "beyond reasonable doubt" part is more recent still, a set of legal rules that would not be used in court cases until 1800, 2200 year after this case.

Yes Socrates was convicted simply on the fact that more people shouted he was guilty than that shouted he was innocent. However this was a very high legal standard for the time that should not be looked down upon. In most places and times during history, a single ruler would simply decide on his gut feeling if the person was guilty, usually without so much as hearing the accused's version of events and extract a far crueler punishment. Socrates was given a chance to talk to the crowds and explain to them why he was not guilty. He could not convince them. That's how justice worked in Athens.

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.

Major portions of our economy function through planned obsolescence and doing everything possible in design to make old products look "old", even though functionality hasn't really changed from the old model. Think car manufacturing.

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

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.

No, it only makes one size coffee.

They did a similar thing with our office elevators. They replaced the physical call buttons with a touchscreen. It doesn't do anything other than call the elevator.

It's far less usable because someone who's blind can't use it.

> It's far less usable because someone who's blind can't use it.

I would have thought an elevator not usable by blind people would be illegal.

They have a separate physical button for people who can't use the touchscreen. I assume it calls the security desk and requires them to intervene.

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.

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.

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.

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...

My SmartThings supports a smartphone geo-fence to detect presence and an NFC fob if you don't want to link a phone. I don't understand why my Nest can't do that too.

I get the feeling that Nest has transitioned from innovation to revenue.

We gave up on the auto-away stuff and use the Skylark app on our phones, which does geo-fencing. I agree that this should be a built in function of the Nest app, but a five dollar app as a workaround isn't too bad.

> 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...

"unrealistic deadlines and a hierarchical management structure" describes basically our entire industry....not to imply that we should accept this as the "norm"...but kinda funny the way they put it.

It's the "always crunch time" bit that resonated, along with the reasons why.

"He has a 68% approval rating on anonymous data-sharing site Glassdoor, but the several ex-employees Business Insider spoke to highlighted an atmosphere of "fear" and said that sitting near Fadell's office meant hearing a constant barrage of shouting."

I really hope the people working there have opportunities elsewhere and are aware of their options. Nobody should feel obligated to work in an environment like that. If more engineers refuse to accept these conditions hopefully executives will be more hesitant to treat their employees this way.

Absolutely, not only are those poor employees doing themselves a disservice, but they really are doing the rest of us a disservice too by perpetuating those kinds of environments. The employees are the fuel of any company, and when you keep fueling a company with an environment like that, it sends a signal. Not a good one.

The problem with Glassdoor CEO approval ratings is that they often don't reflect a really bad CEO lacking direct exposure to a lot of employees. In large organizations, perceived business success drives approval more than anything else. Look at Jeff Bezos with 81% - his success and that of the organization are very decoupled in this measure from personal experience of him. On the other hand, I know another Seattle organization with a CEO approval rate of 13% - it's small enough that all employees have (mostly negative) CEO contact.

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>

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

I was hoping for that reaction.

Cattle prods, man, they do wonders.

Dev: Waaah, waaa, waa, cannot do that by Friday, blah blah refactoring blah technical debt, waah

Me: ZAP

Dev: Can do.

Reminds me of a former shop I've mentioned before. Did better than expected at Demo conf, launched with bugs and no admin/ops team, required devs to be on call after longs weeks. My favorite was getting yelled at for disappearing somewhere with no cell coverage (I wasn't on call) over a weekend for the wife's birthday. I left not too many weeks after that. Didn't make it a year for vesting.

Sometimes, you just have to walk.

And if it is "always crunch time", management is doing something wrong.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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...

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!

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

"Open the pod bay doors, Hal."

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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..)

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...

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.

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

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