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When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale. Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But

• INTPenis 1y ago
  Do you have inside info about this? I'm just wondering why the internal support people would fight a decision like only allowing supported drives, wouldn't that make their job easier?
  • m000 1y ago
    A tiny bit easier, at the risk of reducing the profitability of the company, which could mean losing their jobs.
    • bapak 1y ago
      Doesn't make much sense to me? How would they argue that? "Don't ban third party HDDs, you'll earn less on sales and you won't have to pay me". Wut
    • glenstein 1y ago
      Evidently profitability went down due to the change, so if anything they were fighting for their jobs by opposing it. (If it is indeed true that they were opposing it internally, still not sure where exactly that claim is coming from.)
    • INTPenis 1y ago
      It depends on who their target audience is. VMware for example have strict hardware compatibility lists because their target audience is big enterprise. But Synology being a consumer NAS, this decision was perhaps not wise. They're sort of standing in two markets. They need to make a decision as to which products are enterprise and which are consumer. I don't think any enterprise clients would mind a strict HCL.
  • vladvasiliu 1y ago
    I don't know about Synology, don't know anyone there, but in my case I do this kind of thing out of principle. Often I'll just voice my opinion and try to convince management even if it doesn't directly affect me (I don't work support). I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial. In the specific case of NAS support, I doubt that would make a lot of difference. I bet 90% of people will call about their NAS not working without first checking that it's actually plugged in. Why do you think this question is on top of the list? Had a very similar complaint last Friday: I work in infrastructure, and some people were installing something that needed networking. Dude comes up: "I don't get any network". Huh. I ask if it's actually plugged in. Nope.
    • Stratoscope 1y ago
      You may enjoy this classic Raymond Chen post: Blow the dust out of the connector https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40423 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...
    • palata 1y ago
      > I think that, generally, we all benefit when things are done well and relations are not adversarial. That's how we all benefit. But if a company wants to benefit more than you, they can. That's how enshittification works.
  • newsclues 1y ago
    Because trying to explain stupid decisions is annoying and listening to endless complaints is demoralizing. Source: worked AppleCare
  • glenstein 1y ago
    My read is that they don't have inside info and are guessing.
    • VWWHFSfQ 1y ago
      And by guessing, we mean grasping wildly at nonsense.
      • pylotlight 1y ago
        Why are people booing you, you're right.
        • ryandrake 1y ago
          People are booing because HN commenters generally kind of meritocratic and lowkey idolize company leaders. It's an unpopular opinion here, but executives aren't in their positions because they are smarter than everyone else, or better at business, or have better product ideas. They're generally there for less meritocratic reasons: They went to the right prep school and college, they were friends with the right people already in the executive class, they rubbed elbows with other business leaders in MBA school, they golf at the right country clubs. Then they get that sweet VP title and fail upward all the way to retirement.
      • glenstein 1y ago
        There's nothing wrong with guessing, just be clear that it's a guess and not an attempt to represent known facts. I don't know if the comment got edited or just reads more clearly on a second pass, but at first it felt ambiguous.
• luca4 1y ago
  Yes and choosing a NAS brand is not something you change your mind like switching an android phone brand after 2-3years. This will stick quite a bit.
  • kstrauser 1y ago
    Yep. I’d already started moving things out of Docker on my DS923+ and onto RaspberryPis, of all things, which are perfectly powerful for my needs. Synology’s police shoved me toward planning and implementing alternatives as I vowed never, ever, to spend a penny on such a locked down device. It’s going to be hard for them to un-ring that bell. In a few years, when it’s time to replace this NAS, if they’ve demonstrated that they’re serious about doing right by their customers, I may replace it with another Synology. And if not, I’ll have already migrated my services off it such that I’ll only need a “dumb” NAS and can choose from any of their competitors.
    • kstrauser 1y ago
      (Amendment: Synology's policy, not police. If they have police, so far they haven't shown up at my house and told me to stop it.)
  • PaulKeeble 1y ago
    A bad reputation never goes away either. Trust once lost is not something that returns easily. Some customers might forgive a company but many wont and any business willing to be this scummy will almost certainly do something else (or the same thing again in a few years).
• rickdeckard 1y ago
  While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope". I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...
  • WmWsjA6B29B4nfk 1y ago
    Certainly has nothing to do with "official" drives being crazily overpriced.
    • gertop 1y ago
      If you compare the branded version vs the equivalent model from the manufacturer you'll find that there's a markup but it's minimal.
    • supportengineer 1y ago
      The sales team should be able to sell the value proposition using hard facts. "The official drives have a MTBF which is X longer which saves you Y amount of time and Z dollars, but the choice and the risk is up to you."
  • cyanydeez 1y ago
    This was greenlit as a cash grab first, justify support later. They wanted a vertical ecosystem of expensive drives. If Synology drives had the same or limited price points as third party, sure. But Synology was charging Apple level prices.
  • bkma 1y ago
    [dead]
  • glenstein 1y ago
    They could also oppose the change simply out of a belief in what's best for the customers, and an ethos of hardware compatibility. It would represent no change to their burden to continue the company's long-standing policy.
• anal_reactor 1y ago
  I've realized that at my current workplace it's a recurring theme that I suggest a solution, it gets rejected, we circle around for a year, finally we go back to my solution. It is indeed extremely demotivating, because it gives me an impression that I'm working with stupid people. I don't want to leave the company, but I'll try to switch teams next year.
  • hsjsjdnbdbdb 1y ago
    Sounds like you don't argue hard enough
    • lazide 1y ago
      Bosses often fire people who ‘argue hard enough’.
    • anal_reactor 1y ago
      Eh. I'm out of fucks to give.
      • BLKNSLVR 1y ago
        I've been at a couple of places where I've had similar experiences and I get to the point where I'll explain it once, and if they're not listening or discard the suggestion without really considering it, then I'll just wait for them to figure it out themselves. I get paid either way. I'm generally looking for another job when it gets to this point. It's not healthy to stick around when things get to that point.
        • kstrauser 1y ago
          I’ve been there. After a while, I realized that they’re paying for my advice. If they take it, awesome. If they don’t, and I feel like I did a good enough job communicating my reasons, then that’s their option, and their consequences. It’s annoying, but either way I get paid.
• taneq 1y ago
  Is this not the norm in any mid-to-large company that makes a bad decision (or even a decision that’s seen to be bad)? In my experience internal morale often suffers before the customers catch on.
• bonoboTP 1y ago
  This is a quite competitive market, far from monopolies. So let them do what their incentives and company culture lead them to. The reality is that often such leaders can come out net positive on a personal level even if they drive the company to the ground because they extracted out everything in a short term ("eating the seed corn"), then will go somewhere else. But at least the company and its products disappear. It's evolution. It's not always better to save them by being some kind of internal hero.
• jacquesm 1y ago
  What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive this in the longer term, regardless of the reversal they've shown they do not have their customers interests at heart at all. It's dumber that it even seems: they were raking in a substantial amount of money precisely because of this one factor, and they pretty much shot the goose that was laying the golden eggs. I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.
  • reactordev 1y ago
    There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…
    • deelowe 1y ago
      Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of any such claims.
      • dangus 1y ago
        500MB/s NVMe via the M.2 hat. It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity. Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.
• potato3732842 1y ago
  I think it speaks volumes about the work ethic (or less charitably, moral character) of the HN comment section that so many people are bewildered as to why support would prefer to troubleshoot questionable hardware than tell people "fuck off and come back with supported hardware" all day. Unless you're a real POS doing that sort of work sucks way worse than actually working to solve people's problems even if the latter requires a few more brain cells. And it only takes the most casual contact with the support people in your organization to understand this. If the people answering phones and chats didn't actually want to solve people's problems they could make more money working at the DMV counter or selling time shares or whatever. The people this decision is bad for are the engineers who have to work marginally harder to write more robust code to work with hardware they can't necessarily get hands on in advance to test with.
  • flkiwi 1y ago
    Are you saying Synology’s move to support first party drives was a good thing? Plenty of companies deal with unpredictable hardware and, in fact, Synology has for years, in part thanks to standards.
    • izacus 1y ago
      No, the person you're responding to isn't saying that at all.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  • mixermachine 1y ago
    We are talking about run-of-the-mill HDDs here with SATA 3 (2005) and SMART (<2000) interface. No product is perfect but these interfaces are very well tested and billions of machines run as expected with them. The move from them was purely for money reasons.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
• varispeed 1y ago
  > That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. People need to learn, that unless you are a real shareholder, never give company everything. Give just enough so they don't fire you. Company is not yours and it will drop you the moment spreadsheet says no.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• teekert 1y ago
  I think stuff like this can be countered, but it would require a step in the other direction, becoming more open, ie open source some important component (or make ssh work normally?). Show that you do really listen. Repent. It seems like Ubuiqiti is back in our collective hearts after they accidentally showed other peoples camera footage in people apps. Now their tag line is "Building the Future of IT. License Free". So that's more in-touch. I personally avoid Synology because of my experiences with poorly supported Tailscale (and abismal performance using Samba over Tailscale), and their crazy stance over ssh and ssh-keys. Only admins can use ssh. So there go all your options of quickly sharing stuff with people after getting their ssh key. I really regret our Synologies, should have gone with a normal Linux server and a ZFS array. Of course, I just had wrong assumptions at the start (and someone else made the call actually.)
  • stirfish 1y ago
    What if you were to run your guest ssh in a container with the relevant volumes attached? I can't recall how the base ssh works with Synology DSM, but everything interesting I do with my NAS is done with containers.
    • teekert 1y ago
      I usually run containers by writing some yaml (and then use podman/docker compose), I’ve started and then quit trying to use whatever interface Synology offers, call me stupid but I find it intimidating.
• ChrisRR 1y ago
  There are way too many companies where higher ups and marketing will refuse to listen to the engineers about what people actually like about their products. See every company currently shoehorning AI chatbots into software that doesn't need it
• alphazard 1y ago
  This is why it's so important to track dissenting opinions before a decision is made and before the consequences are revealed. Were I an investor in Synology I would be calling for some people to lose their job over being this wrong when the right answer was easily accessible. There's probably some people who got this right who could take a shot at running things, but you can't know without having the dissenting opinions in writing ahead of time.
• behnamoh 1y ago
  I'm curious, do you know of examples of companies that lost their best engineers despite reversing course on a shitty policy? My understanding is that people want to pay the bills, and esp. in this economy, most prefer to have a job rather than searching for a new one. That ofc is different for the more senior engineers who are in demand, but the junior ones will probably still stick around despite the management's policies.
  • makeitdouble 1y ago
    There is a time span between the policy is comitted internally and the time that policy is reverted. In Synology's case it's probably more than half a year, in other companies it could take a full year or more to reverse course. Half a year is plenty enough to move away. Of course people don't like looking for a new job, but they don't like shitty leadership either. And speaking of paying the bills, you won't get much of a bonus or promotion when profits are plunging, so moving away earlier than later is usually a good idea.
    • kijin 1y ago
      At the very least, some people who otherwise wouldn't have actively looked for other opportunities might start doing so. This can have consequences several months down the road, even if they don't quit immediately.
• DerpHerpington 1y ago
  It's this level of out of touch with their market that gives me zero faith in them as a brand. They also killed their Videostation product, that was downloaded over 66 million times according to their package manager, rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders. All they have done over the past few years is remove features, add more vendor lock in, and be tone deaf to their market. They deserve their own downfall, utter corporate stupidity.
  • devilbunny 1y ago
    > killed their Videostation product ... rather than offer users the option of paying to license video decoders YES, yes, a million times yes. Footgun, own goal, whatever term you like: if your "prosumer" products are essentially teasers to get the people who select the commercial products familiar with your brand, decisions like killing Videostation and banning non-Syno HDDs are not putting your best foot forward.
• mguerville 1y ago
  Very true, and also users aren't naive, it just signals that the greed factor is now winning over the pride into the product and it's the end of the product line as a truly DIY platform. I expect they'll wait a few months then find another way to achieve the same goal, like gating some features to NASes with official HDD only, or throttling 3rd party I/O
• rzwitserloot 1y ago
  It's an interesting lesson. I think I do get it. This is one of those rare cases where: * This interpreation is understandable: 'this is a ridiculous cash grab, this single act says so much about the attitude of this company that the right answer for consumers is to run for the hills, and for those who work there to start looking for the exit'. * ... but perhaps not: I can totally see it; the cost of the process is much higher than the hardware here. Adding a tiny extra cost with the aim of allowing synology to offer more integration is presumably worth it. Also, scams with harddisks are rife (written-off heavily used old disks being resold as brand new) and synology is trying to protect their customers. I think it's a bit misguided, but there is an explanation available that has little to with 'cash grab / enshittification' principles. Giving them the benefit of the doubt: Even if you know you're right, if you're dependent on others understanding that you're right, then you either [A] do a fantastic job on explaining the necessity of your actions and keep plugging away at it until you're sure you got that right or [B] you. can't. do. it. So they still messed up, and the damage is now done. If indeed this is the explanation (they messed up on communication but they had honest intentions so to speak) I'd hope they can now fix it, take their lumps, and survive. But if not, yes, the well respected staff will leave and they'll end up being another crappy company that primarily serves as a reference for the dictionary definition of "enterprise software". Expensive and shit.
  • kapone 1y ago
    The damage is indeed done. If they wanted to do it the right way, they should have offered Synology branded HDDs (from whatever upstream vendor) AT COST to their customers. See the problem there...?
  • gosub100 1y ago
    To me it's obvious why they initially chose to use validated hardware: 1) the unlabelled SMR debacle a few years ago probably wasted untold amounts of time and caused unwarranted damage to their brand from frustrated people who just paid $1k for their Synology, $1k for drives, and then couldn't build a working array with them, possibly even losing data and productivity in the process. 2) penny pinching cheapskates buying broken hdds on the used market and complaining that "their Synology doesn't work". Or swapping failed drives with garbage and again wasting time of support. 3) they are premium products, not intended for the hobbyist. Their customers generally are willing to spend more in exchange for a premium experience. In order to provide this, especially to less tech savvy people (you know, people who want to actually USE their NAS instead of just tinker with it every day), it made sense to control the quality of the drives. However the Internet peanut gallery has been so used to being exploited that their scam detectors falsely activated and they all swarmed out of their (neckbeard) nests. So synology has no option than to backtrack and offer free tech support for the bottom quartile of "knows just enough to break it" techies.
• ec109685 1y ago
  Horowitz talks about this in-depth in “What you do is Who You Are.” There are waypoints in a company’s life that can change their trajectory and when you have the weight of employees, their family and company’s existence on your shoulders, it’s easy to compromise on a value like customer centricity. Your culture needs to be strong enough so that doesn’t happen. https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/ https://a16z.com/books/what-you-do-is-who-you-are/
• ponooqjoqo 1y ago
  We shouldn't normalize referring to managers as leaders. Leadership didn't make this decision, management did. High level managers aren't leaders. Similarly, politicians are not "leaders". They are administrators and managers.
• mihaaly 1y ago
  I also believe that this peek into the mentality of the organization leadership makes doubt in customers if the organization can be trusted again. I, personally, will think more than twice before choosing them again. This will be several years of recovery for the reputation, if it ever happens at all. Synology is in the box called 'squeezing cutomers for money' and the customer has no incentive to spend any time or money to test if the classification is still valid. Will stay there, despite this step. There is doubt that they changed their way of thinking. They only reacted to the repercussion to THIS specific action of theirs, that became measurably very bad for THEM. It was not like they revised their action after the outcry, no. They had to bleed, they want to stop THEIR bleeding, not making it good again for the customer. benefit for the remaining customers is just a coincidence here. I am not hopeful for their change of mentality. Which could be something disappointing to hear for faithful employees.
• add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  > it also severely impacts internal morale. I worked for a game developer that went through a stretch of unpopular decisions with the community and it definitely upset me in both my role as a player and as an employee. The second time I worked for a developer whose game I played I'd learned to compartmentalize and things went smoother.
• dheera 1y ago
  The ship has sailed. I'm eyeing the Unifi UNAS 8 which ships this month.
• pfexec 1y ago
  Would you say the same thing about Apple? The "replaceable" SSD in the M4 Mac Mini is proprietary and will not accept a standard M.2 module. This was a deliberate choice. Assuming you locate an exact match, you need a second, working, Mac to provision it. The entire process is user-hostile from start to finish yet the criticism is few (and I've even read praise of this practice on Mac fan sites).
  • dheera 1y ago
    Because if you say something bad about Apple you get downvoted to oblivion.
  • thoroughburro 1y ago
    Synology has equivalent competition. Apple doesn’t.
• setgree 1y ago
  "That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years" is a strong argument against giving a company your "everything." They'll cut you loose in a minute.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• liquid_thyme 1y ago
  Lock-in actually helps internal development. If you're targeting fixed hardware, writing software gets a lot easier. Your "guess" is not logical.
• dstroot 1y ago
  In my experience the secondary effect on morale from the leadership who did this not being impacted or punished is even worse. My experience is that employees would love to see leadership held accountable (as the employees are) and morale rebounds. If leadership is not held accountable it’s much worse for morale.
• supportengineer 1y ago
  If their branded hard drives are so good, they needn't be afraid of their customers having a choice. If the customer choose to use cheap hard drives and encounter problems, that's on them. Sometimes you have to allow people the freedom to feel the pain. Once they feel the pain, they will be motivated to make change.
• asdff 1y ago
  Synology's days are numbered imo. Their userbase exists at a careful precipice of people who are technically inclined to understand the importance of a NAS vs cloud hosting solutions, but not so technically inclined to build their own NAS. This can't be a very deep market. You can only really have marketing chase the less inclined of these who are still on cloud services and hoping to educate them that the cloud services are really bad afterall, despite the conveniences of the walled garden you have to educate to the point where they leave that garden. Educating a less technically inclined populace towards technical merits is one of the most difficult tasks in marketing. You also can't really market to the people who are building their own NAS because they will just see the spec sheet for what it is, and see synology hardware stack is nothing special and is in fact quite marked up and not very performant to begin with. And while this doomed business is existing, something new emerges from the far east to further challenge it. Chinese N100 nas boards. Chinese nas cases. N100 mini pcs already built with spare 3.5" SATA hookups. More and more videos and posts of people building their own nas and showing how they did it. Really, what is synology's value proposition? It relies on a bit of knowledge but a careful amount of ignorance too.
  • devjab 1y ago
    I think you may be underestimating the amount of people who would buy the easy sollution. I've been part of a makerspace where we've tinkered with 3D printers since before it was cool. I still have a Bambu Lab printer myself because it's the "iPhone" of 3D printers that just works out of the box. I used to have a Linux laptop and now I have a MacBook because it's easy. If I were to buy a NAS it'd be the "iPhone" NAS because it was easy. Though I don't think your prediction for Synology is wrong. I'd certainly pick the one that didn't previously try to push their own HDD's.
    • asdff 1y ago
      It is also competing for simple solutions like an old mac mini and DAS. Now that would truly be an "iphone" like experience for someone already in the mac ecosystem since time machine lets you choose another mac on LAN as a backup endpoint with little fuss, and now you can make use of Airdrop for mobile devices. AFAIK backing up to a linux box is not nearly so trivial at least with still using Time Machine.
• OptionOfT 1y ago
  This really feels like they hired a study from one of the big 3 and this the recommendation they came up with.