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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Elgato stuff is cheap but horribly unreliable in my experience. Thanks for the writeup, it's showing why that is very detailed...

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The flashing and corruption problems point to a very poor software engineering culture.

How does the corruption point to a software engineering issue? What could cause corruption and how could it be avoided by better software engineering?

It's a culture issue when such cases don't get caught in testing and support staff either doesn't know about it (=the scripts are bad), doesn't get told that there is a workaround (because clearly there is), or (the worst of the possible options) gets told to act like everything is fine.

It's a race condition which involves physical interaction with the product, which only occurs during a very rare operation, which looks pretty much identical to a genuine hardware defect.

This isn't something you can just trivially unit test. If you don't see this happen multiple times during initial hardware development, you are never catching it. A single failure of a prototype can easily be attributed to a manufacturing defect - especially if it was hand-soldered.

Once it's in the field replacing the 0.01% of units suffering from random issues under warranty is far cheaper than having an engineer spend weeks trying to diagnose every single weird failure mode. Unless it affects a number of units, it's just not worth the money. You have to consider that support doesn't get a "the LEDs stopped working when I unplugged the device immediately after flashing it" message, they just get "the LEDs don't work". Support scripts are made for horses, not zebras.

> Once it's in the field replacing the 0.01% of units suffering from random issues under warranty is far cheaper than having an engineer spend weeks trying to diagnose every single weird failure mode. Unless it affects a number of units, it's just not worth the money.

It does affect a number of units, that's the point, and it's serious enough that the brand image is suffering. Just google "elgato unreliable" - tons of results, and when the top result is a Reddit post in the official Elgato subreddit of all places literally titled "My elgato experience has left me with nothing but hate in my heart", all alarm sirens should go fucking off.

To top it off, Elgato used to be a German brand right out of Munich [1]. German products used to be noteworthy for top-notch engineering and reliability...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/elgato/comments/18k92zy/my_elgato_e...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgato

That is awfully close to blaming the engineers.

You don't know what kind of pressures they are under to deliver.

I know of significant compromises in all the software I have written, and I would make hardware mistakes if I had taken the electronic engineer path. Sometimes we have to prioritize and I've never had an unlimited time budget on any project (not even my own).

Projects with no issues are mostly dead!

Well high pressure to deliver is sort of a poor culture isn't it? I agree we should be forgiving of others mistakes, but I also think we ought to strive to develop better solutions that lead to fewer bugs at any given velocity.

A poor engineering culture usually exists because management broke it, rather than because the engineers failed to create it. Of course I have no insight into how Elgato is run, so I am not pointing fingers. I merely state that there is certainly evidence that their engineers are not focused on quality.

It’s sad because their stuff, like the key lights and the stream deck are neat and really useful. and the software has all the features you’d want and you can make your own plugins for it and they document the process for making the plugins. All really cool.

But in practice I’m constantly having to power cycle my key lights and having to restart the stream deck app on windows.

Btw I switched from using their app to bitfocus companion instead. Still lets me control my stream deck but no more elgato Corsair bloat

I maintain a lot of their stuff for my coworkers. It's nice looking, and easy to understand, but they also have a lot of things that are kludgy clunky or strange that don't make any sense.

Their ring light, for instance, can't be manually turned off using the shoulder buttons. It can only be set to a low dim. Why not? Makes no sense.

Their FaceCam needs a high bandwidth usb 3.0 port all to itself. Won't reliably work over a hub. Why not? I mean, give it a low bandwith 720p mode or something.

The Mic has a headphone jack, sure, no problem, but why does it install 8 audio devices during the install? Only install what is needed!

Their USB capture cards have issues staying connected unless they are plugged directly into the laptop/desktop motherboard, and even then they flip out every few hours.

These issues have ensured that I won't buy any of their stuff. I've recreated an entire elgato stack that would have cost $500+ for like $90 in cheap chinesium crap and it works perfectly.

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