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> Three former Nest employees independently brought up this same anecdote when describing how Nest had an internal culture where it was "always crunch time" be

• askafriend 11y ago
  "unrealistic deadlines and a hierarchical management structure" describes basically our entire industry....not to imply that we should accept this as the "norm"...but kinda funny the way they put it.
  • sjs382 11y ago
    It's the "always crunch time" bit that resonated, along with the reasons why.
• TTPrograms 11y ago
  "He has a 68% approval rating on anonymous data-sharing site Glassdoor, but the several ex-employees Business Insider spoke to highlighted an atmosphere of "fear" and said that sitting near Fadell's office meant hearing a constant barrage of shouting." I really hope the people working there have opportunities elsewhere and are aware of their options. Nobody should feel obligated to work in an environment like that. If more engineers refuse to accept these conditions hopefully executives will be more hesitant to treat their employees this way.
  • askafriend 11y ago
    Absolutely, not only are those poor employees doing themselves a disservice, but they really are doing the rest of us a disservice too by perpetuating those kinds of environments. The employees are the fuel of any company, and when you keep fueling a company with an environment like that, it sends a signal. Not a good one.
  • pinewurst 11y ago
    The problem with Glassdoor CEO approval ratings is that they often don't reflect a really bad CEO lacking direct exposure to a lot of employees. In large organizations, perceived business success drives approval more than anything else. Look at Jeff Bezos with 81% - his success and that of the organization are very decoupled in this measure from personal experience of him. On the other hand, I know another Seattle organization with a CEO approval rate of 13% - it's small enough that all employees have (mostly negative) CEO contact.
• IgorPartola 11y ago
  A great way to fix that is to add more managers to gain better control of your runaway teams. Microsoft Project might be a good solution to get them back on track too. Planning out every hour of the project at the beginning really helps developers focus and get things done. Oh, and you want to introduce daily status meetings, preferably in the morning. As a final step, it helps to let a few people go and put a hiring freeze on developers. You don't want to reward their departments' bad behavior by giving them more people. I've seen this done at several companies before and it always leads to spectacularly amazing results. </sarcasm>
  • siquick 11y ago
    I was crying inside until I saw the saracasm tag...
    • IgorPartola 11y ago
      I was hoping for that reaction.
  • carterehsmith 11y ago
    Cattle prods, man, they do wonders. Dev: Waaah, waaa, waa, cannot do that by Friday, blah blah refactoring blah technical debt, waah Me: ZAP Dev: Can do.
• jmspring 11y ago
  Reminds me of a former shop I've mentioned before. Did better than expected at Demo conf, launched with bugs and no admin/ops team, required devs to be on call after longs weeks. My favorite was getting yelled at for disappearing somewhere with no cell coverage (I wasn't on call) over a weekend for the wife's birthday. I left not too many weeks after that. Didn't make it a year for vesting. Sometimes, you just have to walk. And if it is "always crunch time", management is doing something wrong.