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I’ve worked at a company Samsung ended up buying. Exactly as you describe: humiliating, alienating, and infantilizing. Never ever again. And I won’t buy Samsung anything if I can help it because I saw how the software is made… it’s appalling in quality. No thanks.

What makes you think that it is any different elsewhere?

Using it? Samsung software (see e.g smart TV) is incredibly unreliable.

I've worked elsewhere. Samsung is in the bottom tier for every dimension that matters to quality (of life and of products).

As a data point: Sony, Panasonic, LG, etc… all try to have calibrated TVs that match the director’s intent. As in, the colours and contrast are defined in the standards, and they strive to show them accurately. They do cheat a little bit and have a “demo” mode the cranks up the saturation and brightness in store to compensate for the overhead lighting.

Samsung takes that cheating to 11 and there is no way to turn it off. It’s not “store mode”. It’s permanently “enhanced” to the point of absurdity.

They just don’t care enough to have two modes.

You can definitely turn off the "enhance" on the Samsungs...

If the feature is there, it's better hidden than others. Some time ago when I was shopping for a TV, it looked like every brand's demo mode hurt my eyes (Samsung was the worst but not only one). On Sony I was able to find the "Cinema Pro" mode that looks quite nice under a minute. And no, I couldn't figure out how to disable microphone or SambaTV so the Sony will never be connected to Internet.

>the colours and contrast are defined in the standards, and they strive to show them accurately

Not to defend Samsung, but this isn't such an objectively straightforward task as you make it sound. It's impossible, in the general case, to convert colors from one colorspace to another without information loss. So there's an element of subjectivity and judgement in selecting the algorithm used. In other words, they're all "enhanced", and your complaint is simply that Samsung has poor taste.

Of course this all assumes that the display is doing its own color management. This is exactly what you want with a standalone TV, but for a computer display you really want to just provide the computer with the ICC profile and give it the lowest-level access to the pixel values possible, so that the user can assume control over the rendering intent - for that you'd want some kind of "direct mode". It's quite right to criticize Samsung if they do not offer such a mode, but are the other brands any better? The trend for TVs seems to lead away from being good general purpose displays, and towards being standalone devices.

> the general case, to convert colors from one colorspace to another without information loss.

Even in the general case that's not true for new televisions: These typically convert from a smaller space to a large one, which can be done 100% losslessly and accurately as intended.

This is quite common, because as TV panel capabilities have largely outstripped the distribution and encoding standards. For example, Rec.709 (the HD standard) is smaller than what any modern 4K TV can display.

The 4K Rec.2020 standard is huge, but it only exceeds typical panel capabilities along the green axis. This may seem like conversion would be lossy, but if you look carefully at video metadata, it ofen specifies that the "content gamut" is smaller. That is, most modern 4K HDR content is mastered on a display that "merely" has a gamut like Display P3, so that's all you need to reproduce it 1:1.

None of this is done by Samsung. They always stretch colours up to the maximum capability of the panel. These days, that's very close to the full Rec.2020 gamut and looks downright garish. Even if "AI enhanced" or whatever, it's wrong. Colours are distorted and nowhere near the original intent.

After giving up on Nokia and friends complaining about Moto and Pixel, its brothers in stock Android, I switched to Samsung and felt it was a massive improvement. If I'm refusing to buy Chinese brands and iPhone and stuck to models available in India, what are my choices?

If any apps work on the Samsung phone, it's because of the app developers' sweat, tears and cursing when they work around the phone-specific bugs that seem to be different for each model. Even Huawei and Xiaomi are better than that.

Source: I work an audio-related mobile app. The audio engine code is littered with comments that read like "On phone X, Y happens and we do Z to work around it". In about 75% of the cases X is some Samsung model. And before you ask, X is the phone it was discovered on so there's no guarantee that the same issues don't occur on other phones but somehow Samsung is the name that always pops up.

Have you heard of Purism or Fairphone? Not sure if they work in India though. Maybe this is an angle for India to enter the market.

I've not really had issues with the Pixel. This is anecdata, but I've had the 2 and currently have the 4a. My wife has the 5. We've had zero issues with them (except for stuff we did ourselves, like cracking the screens) over the past 4-ish years.

I had the 1. The battery died after 2 years but it had already stopped receiving Android updates at that point. The 4a has been good so far but around here the 4a and 5a had really poor availability.

Yeah I guess I should have added in the caveat that I've never owned a phone in 15 years that has lasted more than 2 years due to some kind of mishap. Usually a broken screen or water damage.

On a side note, My favorite phone I've ever had was an LG Envy 3. It was about the size of the palm of my hand and, closed, had a 1.25" screen and a standard 9-key keypad. It could also flip open to reveal a full qwerty keyboard and a 3" screen with some respectable stereo speakers.

Sony?

I know this anecdotal and related but directly on-point, but here I go anyway...

About 12 years ago, I consulted, on-site, for about a year with a Japanese company with a very very very untrusting corporate culture. (I was consulting on electronics and firmware.)

Every USB port on every computer was super-glued shut (yes, I know...) And literally 100% of the internet traffic went over a T1 (for those of you just out of diapers, that is a 1.5 Mbps line) to Tokyo and back. Corporate saw every bit of internet activity.

This company, when I talked with the VP of engineering, told me "we have flexible work hours; you can take lunch 12:00-12:30, or 12:30-1:00pm. As long as you're back at your desk within 5 minutes of lunch end, we will not be required to make note of it"

Man that was a horrible gig. But I made enough $$$ to overcome the agony. I have so many consulting stories... my daughters keep telling me I need to write a book.

"When Bill and Michelle ruined a conference room table"

"When Jayanthi [no I'm not changing her name] had a meltdown and threw a sharp object at the head of a subordinate"

"When Tom impregnated his secretary during his divorce, and was basically forced to marry her the day after his divorce was finalized"

"When I put a choke hold on a corporate security guard who incorrectly identified a computer peripheral in my backpack as confidential company property"

I think the 100 people who bought the book would really enjoy it

That would probably be a popular book given how well A.G. Martinez's Chaos Monkeys has sold.

> … submit a written apology.

What the hell kind of mentality is this?

I’ve been in a workplace that cracked down on phone use. Everyone was pissed. I considered carrying a small block of wood painted black in act of subversion.

> What the hell kind of mentality is this?

sighs Traditional Asian mentality. I, and definitely many others, hate it, but it's definitely not just Samsung.

I had to do worse than that when I worked for a Japanese company (with a Korean-Japanese president). I was forced by him to apologize to the entire assembled staff for a 'big mistake that I had made'. Except it wasn't really my mistake it was a foundry change which caused a timing change that affected the code in a vendor's startup for a chip we were using. I was so burned out from crunching on the project (14 hour days) to reverse engineer and fix it fast enough for the president to be happy...

I really won't be working in japan I think LOL

people getting a slight glimpse of korean work culture, top-down old school butts in the seat type stuff. it's changing but there's a long way to go.

But they had to get to where they are now somehow. It's hard to believe this exact company culture could habe achieved anything more involved than cloning overseas electrical devices like toasters and microwaves. So was the culture different in the past in some way at least? Like, at least having more technically knowledgeable people in upper management, if not more creative freedom for engineers et al?

I'd like to believe the process has to be at least a little bit similar to how agile, innovative and leading companies in the West can within a decade or two turn into stiff, burocratic slow moving behemoths that at best manage to buy any upcoming competition instead of innovating on its own.

if you have a good leader at the helm then the top down approach can be beneficial because you can cut through a lot of the BS. IMO it's like how democracies aren't really about the best leadership but being able to remove a bad apple.

i'd say that how SK was structured after the war allowed them to flourish, basically a dictator appointing diff people into diff industries and having a state-sponsored acceleration. add to that a drive to succeed and fight and you can somewhat see the building blocks of their success. how SK has progressed is a miracle story.

now that they are seeing the fruits of their labor my guess is you have the "parasites" coming up trying to jockey for position. or with chaebols (these big family dynasties that own a lot of industry in SK) they have their kids/family members who may or may not be competent taking over. essentially what made something like samsung takes a lot to sustain into the next generation.

Drug dealers are equally strict about their employees getting high off the supply.

Why are you so desperate to use your phone?

This is a rule in many manufacturing environments. Intel has had the same exact rule for a very long time.

Does Intel also enforce such a rule to office workers, like Samsung does? I can partly understand the desire to control accidents in manufacturing environments, but we're not exactly at such a place. Samsung's rule is applied to all workers regardless of campus, including the inside of a building consisting of mostly software engineers and office workers. It almost feels like the company wants social equality among employees or something.

Intel's rule was against corporate espionage, so probably? They eventually allowed phones with the cameras drilled out.

All Asian Fabs pretty much ban all smart phones - you have to leave them outside and/or you have to use a "dumb" phone. Laptops, USB drives, etc. are absolute verboten as a vendor or contractor and usually employees as well who have to smuggle them in to get work done. If you violate these bans as a contractor or vendor, YOUR ENTIRE COMPANY can be banned from doing business indefinitely.

A Samsung employee in one of the overseas research centers. I'm not sure about this at all. The most that is restricted is one cannot shoot pictures - either camera lens gets a cover (paper sticker) or the camera is blocked using MDM.

This is practice in many companies and I hear at Apple it is even more restrictive at certain places.

Not able to use phone I never heard or experienced. We regularly test out apps in phone, test out devices (non test ones), we test competition ones, etc. And when one can get on a Zoom or Team's call, what use is restricting phone usage.

Espionage is a very real and major risk in competitive businesses such as leading edge semiconductor or companies like Apple.

2 things here: 1. use a headphone, it is easier, it allows you to walk safer and with a better body posture and 2. my apology for such an incident is "it will not happen again, 'cause I am leaving". I understand and obey safety rules, but not random rules companies can pull any moment in time.

Stay off your damn phone while you're walking.