Nest reviews

The management expects to be able to deliver on time, even when they change requirements daily (up until shipping) and the deadlines don't change. This squeezes QA, designers and developers EVERY SINGLE PROJECT, causing much more stress and forcing people to regularly work nights and weekends. I understand when things change due to market shifts, but most of the changes have to do with poor planning and nobody is held accountable for this. There's never time to work on infrastructure and Tony is always literally yelling about how things aren't good enough or that features should just be there, when they were never planned or specced.

Most broken development process I've ever seen. Every idea you have about how software/hardware should be made properly; assume the opposite is happening here. EVERYTHING has to go to Tony or Matt for approval. This is an incredible waste of time and resources and leads to a lot of negative feelings. When a founding partner is reviewing design colors on a webpage or copy text, no one wins. I've never seen a company so dependent on Keynote/Powerpoint presentations. It is not uncommon to get updated slide decks on a daily basis (with minimal variation), which makes it challenging to follow where we are in projects. Meetings: I have been in meetings with sixty people in which everyone is simply following along while a Project Manager reads a Word document out loud. For one hour. The culture is so heavily dependent on useless meetings that it takes months to get anything out the door. There are meetings to prepare for other meetings. I wish that was a joke. 24/7 culture: Receiving meeting invites at 1am, for a 10am meeting the same day is not uncommon. This has only happened to me a handful of times, but many people complain about this regularly so it must be widespread. If you give a manager your phone number, you can / will be texted at "off the clock" hours regularly. Groupthink: Everyone complains about all of the above things, and knows it's wrong, but no one seems to have the power to stop it. This is due, in part, to the deification of Tony..."Tony wants ___" or "Tony thinks ___ so we have to do it that way" is not uncommon to hear. Once Tony gives something a thumbs up, if further down the development chain, it turns out to have been a bad idea, no one will put the brakes on because "it's already been approved". This is a disastrous way to ship products. There is a huge percentage of the employee population that is formerly from Apple. People who came from Apple REALLY want you to know about it. I've overheard "Apple is our DNA" so many times I get sick. Apple is known to be a terrible place to work, and maybe that explains a bit about how things are here. Doesn't make sense for people to spout off about it so often, unless they're purposely trying to unbalance people with an Us vs Them work environment. The recent Dropcam acquisition is going horribly, by anyone's account. Spending time in their (soon to be former) SF office is like visiting a funeral home. Nest took a brilliant team, making an amazing product, and is currently in the process of destroying it due to all the culture warfare items mentioned above. Dropcam obviously had no idea what they were getting into when they signed the deal, and they must really regret it now. Talking to the people there, it sounds like they had an incredible team (they refer to themselves as "Dropfam") and incredible passion for their products. They are currently being "integrated" into Nest teams, which does not seem to be going well. I'm hearing that some teams are being broken up, with demotions for senior people and things like that. Seeing them in meetings is like watching people who just crawled out of a car crash: they appear dazed, like they can't believe this is their reality. I hear that they have already lost some people, and my guess is that will only get worse when they move to Palo Alto. Lucky for them they won't be moving into the current digs which are horrible (particularly the 900 building which should be condemned). It's anyone's guess how the camera and software products they made will fare, but based on early project slideware I've seen, it's going to get worse before it gets better.