I am 100% not surprised. I spent a year working for Ubiquiti, running the Network Controller team.
Trust me, this whistle-blower "Adam" (I have a few suspicions of who it actually is), toned it down.
The reality is much much worse.
Trust me, this whistle-blower "Adam" (I have a few suspicions of who it actually is), toned it down.
The reality is much much worse.
The US offices were starting to feel empty because so many people were leaving the company. Only place I've ever worked where engineers would quit before they got another job.
Saddest part was all the wasted potential. There were good engineers making good products at Ubiquiti only a few years ago. Once UniFi exploded in popularity the CEO started trying to micromanage everything and it all started falling apart.
So much wasted potential ... so much customer goodwill wasted because (apparently) no company is worth running unless it is a publicly traded unicorn.
Most successes come with some amount of risk or foresight to anticipate the market.
That's a company that needs to be re-worked from the top. All C-level management fired, no golden parachute.
edit: Robert Pera owns 75% of the company, looks like C-level mgmt will never get fired. If you are at this company, just leave.
Based on this, it seems more like an asshole with some attitude problems rather than greed per se.
Being private and successful is hard to achieve in the Capitalistic world we live in, when you achieve it stick to it.
I think it’s best to be specific.
It’s the C-Suite circle jerk.
My apologies for the language, but throwing away the advantage and further potential of the USA, in the interest of personal wealth and quarterly profits, is even more disgusting.
The majority of America’s management culture is horribly broken.
On the plus(?) side this management culture sometimes allows for easy external disruption.
> Now rewrite your entire comment with sonos instead of ubiquiti.
:%s/ubiquity/sonos/g
In the early days, it seemed like Ubiquiti was going to nail it and was building up a strong, loyal following as a result. Then came all the reports of quality problems, promised features never delivered, phoning-home, ads in UIs, the not just security breaches but cover-ups...
How the brand hasn't become toxic already is a mystery to me, yet look at the stock price tracker. It's been trending up for years and it has well over doubled in the past six months alone. Apparently investors aren't too worried about any potential consequences of all these reported problems.
> How the brand hasn't become toxic already is a mystery to me, yet look at the stock price tracker. It's been trending up for years and it has well over doubled in the past six months alone.
This is your answer. No incentive to change. All of the bad engineering decisions have been rewarded by increasing stock price and continued sales.
Most of the original engineers have quit by now. I lost track of how many UniFi engineering leads joined and then quit after it started falling apart. Before I quit, I heard rumors that the CEO was making two separate teams work on the Dream Machine project separately, competing against each other. That made more people quit. I think they were trying to reboot engineering in foreign countries when I left because it felt like we were forgotten in the US offices.
The router will probably reliably carry me until saturating 1Gbps becomes a daily occurrence and the access point will be retired when WiFi 6E comes around (assuming Ubiquiti's WiFi 6E access points aren't required to connect to the cloud.)
Following is to the best of my knowledge! Any ex-Unifi folks or other pros are welcome to correct me:
- The Edgerouter absolutely does not talk to ui.com (except check-for-updates). There's no remote control ability etc etc.
- The Unifi range can be controlled from the cloud, but via your Unifi Cloud Key. You can run this software yourself, without buying extra hardware. When it is not running there is no comms to the cloud. Run the software, configure things, stop the software - I run it in docker on an rpi4.
I don't work in tech, so maybe I'm dumb to this, but why would you ever do this?
IMO, the CEO had a bit of a Steve Jobs hero-worship complex, but only all the bad parts. I can absolutely see him putting two teams on the same project, and "may the best product win".
The team that "lost" would get canned, obviously (I saw it happen to two separate offices while I was there).
Part of me wishes Steve Jobs had never been brought back to Apple and died in obscurity. He's such a bad example. People idolize him, but his good parts can't be imitated, his bad parts can, and a lot of people can't seem to tell the difference.
Without dropping acid at work at least, but that seems to be frowned upon these days.
Businesses put projects out to tender all the time, and other businesses that can provide what is wanted invest sometimes very considerable resources into putting in a bid, knowing that if they don't make the winning bid then those resources will mostly likely be completely wasted. Evidently it is still worth operating a business on that basis because the benefits when you do win outweigh the costs of the failed bids, and those costs might include reducing morale in a team who worked on a failed bid.
If that is the case across industries as a whole then economically it might make sense for a business to operate on the same basis internally for their Next Big Thing. Run multiple independent teams at the start, give them all the same brief, then see which team comes up with the most promising starting point. I don't see much of an argument for continuing the internal competition beyond the concept to prototype stage, though, unless perhaps it turned out that more than one team could produce a product that was viable in its own right without competing for the same market.
It's also the premise of David Mamet's famous play Glengarry Glen Ross.
A lot of CEOs who think they’re the next Steve Jobs, don’t understand their own tech, and presume the solution to their technical problems is a lack of “motivation”.
Creating a skilled skunk works team to handle a critical problem is a great idea. Making two? And putting them in conflict? It’s like throwing your a steak to your dogs to have them fight over dinner. Idiocy.
Perhaps internal competition to that extent simply confuses customers?
XMPP was so promising.
I think this is where strong technical leadership is needed. At some point someone needs to make a decision on the technical direction and have the conviction to stick with it.
It'll come around, it just takes waaaaaaaay longer than you'd think for a slump in engineering quality to be reflected in the market. Especially with hardware.
We have a few publicly traded clients that we've worked with for decades (and by "decades" I mean longer than I've been alive). It's cyclical that they want our engineering to build new products when they're doing bad in the market, and once our work is released and gets them some success they'll design transfer back inhouse as aggressively as possible (their engineers aren't all bad, it's just not an engineering culture there). By the time we're out, they're still riding the upswing. Their management's institutional memory either doesn't see the cycle and/or they don't care beyond the next few quarterly reports.
What I'm trying to say is I know hurts to see your baby languish but it catches up to them, eventually.
Even with this hack, their stuff is still the best available for home use. Netgear or Linksys consumer routers are awful. The mesh devices are okay, but serve of a different market.
The other stuff people recommend is often 2-3x the Unifi price and 2-3x more complicated to setup and configure.
Any ex-employees want to start a company making this stuff that doesn’t suck?
I don't know about 2-3x the price, at least not here in the UK. We looked into this when fitting out a new office with the networking essentials a couple of years ago, and Ubiquiti wasn't particularly attractive on headline prices compared to the other typical brands that get mentioned in that space (MikroTik, DrayTek, etc.).
However, the ability for non-networking experts to set something up quickly that does the job and doesn't have glaring security problems is definitely a competitive advantage in that prosumer to small business market. None of those other brands has a great UI that I've seen and they all tend to assume that anyone who wants to set up a couple of extra APs for a small office WiFi and a standard firewall for the Internet connection will be a pro-level network expert.
I think it would help a lot of people if better products/companies started to compete seriously on that front, and I have to think that with the SME market to fight for there is room to compete with the established names. After all, that is largely how Ubiquiti themselves broke into the market, or at least that's the perception I had at the time.
Also, there are DD-WRT, OpenWRT and such. How comes people don't use those instead of whatever broken software the manufacturer bestows on them?