My time at Nest

know none of those people, but this little opinion piece sounded a lot like one smooth taking exec talking about another smooth talking exec.

TL;DR Nest is great, Tony Fadell is great, every Nest product is great, everything you've read or heard about any of the above in the last 18 months is wrong.

> The first thing to know about Nest’s culture is that it’s a family. They expect loyalty, trust

> Building and shipping hardware products requires an orchestra, not a band.

> Building a phenomenal, time-tested brand requires extreme discipline, and often, a relatively ...

> The dedication to the brand is one of those things that as an employee can seem onerous and taxing ...

> To me, doing great work is a habit, not an occasional outcome

This article is a series of sound bytes with zero information on what it's actually like to work at nest. Sort of like this person's job at nest was more like a club where he was playing pool or something. Not sure what this guy did, but clearly it can't have had many stressful deliverables.

According to his twitter page this person is a software engineer who moved to Product Management.

I bet that a place like Apple and Nest is like that : nice and easy on project managers, very hard on engineers. A company like Google, by contrast, From their products, I expect that mostly the company sides with the engineers, not the PMs.

This article is a great example of why a company describing itself as a family should be a red flag. It usually means they're trying to exploit vulnerabilities in human social instincts in the same way that cults do; abuse is easiest and most effective when the targets are socialised to think of it as the norm to the extent that they start making excuses for it.

This reminds me of the NYTimes Amazon story a few months ago. There were several people who wrote that their experiences were nothing like what the story portrayed. It was possible for both sides to be correct.

It takes a lot of data points to draw a reasonable conclusion. Even then, it won't apply to everyone in a company.

>This means that virtually nothing customer-facing makes it to production that isn’t at the quality or perfection worthy of the brand

Would be slightly interesting to know what happened to the other 5 employees Nest aqui-hired at the same time.

Propagandistic twaddle.