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Former Wyze dev chiming in. What you’re experiencing is Hanlon’s Razor to the max. Have a seat and listen to the story of life as a developer at Wyze to fully u
by throwawyze 5y ago
Former Wyze dev chiming in. What you’re experiencing is Hanlon’s Razor to the max. Have a seat and listen to the story of life as a developer at Wyze to fully understand the culture of incompetence.
Nearly every software team is fractioned between the legacy original Chinese team and the new-ish in-house Seattle counterpart. One of these teams is highly competent, talented, and composed of seasoned devs that joined a company offering extremely generous FAANG compensation. The other team is, well, the opposite of that. There is a power struggle between the factions. They don’t really work together. Changes to pull requests are often ignored if made by the “other” team. There is a lot of finger pointing and weird tattle-tale blaming from one team when the other team introduces a bug, even a minor one on a pre-pre-alpha build.
Management and product decisions seem completely impulsive, changing week to week. There must be dozens of product managers pinging individual developers everyday
asking for status updates on their pet feature request. Some features get requested then scrapped half-way through development. Other major features like Cam Plus Lite are ham-fisted at the last minute without fleshing all the requirements and use case scenarios. Only later in testing the “beta” do we enjoy late night meetings to handle all the “oh shit we never considered THAT”. The amount of tech debt is staggering. EMs are powerless.
The turnover is insanely high. No one seems to know what’s going on or whose responsible for what. Nearly everyone I met had been with the company less than year. Some internal tool doesn’t work and all the documentation, code comments or git commit messages are in a foreign language? Google translate that shit and pray it makes sense.
I could go on and on. But the important takeaway is there is a lot of general confusion at the product management level, internal communication is poor, and everyone is working a thankless 12-16 hours a day building crappy software for crappy hardware.
- simfree 5y agoThis makes sense from what I experienced trying to order the Wyze door sensors back when they were released. My billing address in Seattle was used as a shipping address, rather than the shipping address I listed in the order that was reflected in the order confirmation I was emailed. Support refused to reroute or recall the parcel or send a replacement. In the end you can't expect much at Wyze's price point, just gotta buy it from a competent reseller and reflash the firmware to a community implementation when you get it.
- vrzucchini 5y agoI had no idea that there was a viable community-produced firmware option. Would you mind linking it?
- bradknowles 5y agoIt is more limited in functionality. And there’s at least a couple different versions that I know of, depending on which version of the hardware you have. And both of those versions are dependent on core functionality provided by Chinese sources. That’s the set of primary reasons why I bagged on the community firmware.