Nest Employee Reviews about "people"

Cons

- 100% internally focused - don't think about the consumer when developing marketing plans, only worry about what the CEO and other Google leadership cares about - Fear based leadership - Meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings and many times, meetings about other meetings - Sr. Leadership are incredibly insecure and not trusting of their employees - Ego driven culture at the top, not open to collaboration or any different points of view - Company culture is severely lacking - though, they are trying to improve this - Overall the senior leadership was hired when Nest was a tiny Silicon Valley start up - the leadership they have in place now is not capable of evolving it into the highly functional, creative marketing team it needs to be. - Commute from SF to Palo Alto - they highly discourage working from the city (or even from the Google SF office) - I witnessed a member of senior leadership ask another member of senior leadership to get their team to write positive Glass Door reviews - so clearly they know that there is an issue with company morale.

Cons

- the culture is tyrannical, from concept through execution, all ideas come from the top. every single detail for all 700 employees, whether it be a slight scheduling change, a minor UI change, marketing copy, or even internal communications -- all of these require approval from Tony (the CEO) - the tops down culture has transformed us into a slow moving sloth of a company that demotivates an extremely smart and (once) tenacious team. there's a huge opportunity in front of us, but we will miss it if we cannot right this ship soon with systemic changes. - every step of progress requires pitching to Tony in the form of keynote decks (yes, that's not a typo... even though Google bought us, we still use keynote to communicate literally everything). There's a running joke around the company that we're the most overqualified group of keynote deck builders in the world. If you want to go somewhere to SHIP products instead of making slides, this is not the place for you. But be warned, before you can present your ideas to Tony, be ready to do multiple dry-runs with your team before the "big show." Watch your spirits crumble as your ideas are replaced by your team's suggestions to manipulate the conversation in their favor - "Tony won't like that, change it to this" or "give Tony some choices, so he feels like it was his idea." Instead of innovation, we spend countless hours thinking of ways to get Tony to sign off on an idea. - once an idea has Tony's approval, we stick with it no matter what, because going back and changing it would require countless more hours of even more keynote decks, more dry runs with your team to prep for the Tony meeting, followed by the actual Tony meeting - which may or not go in your favor. If that doesn't sound like fun, then just stick with the old idea. It may not be great, but it's approved. Sound like innovation? If so, then sign up now... you're going to love it. - because everything relies on Tony's approval many of the more savvy vets will tell you that Tony said X even when he didn't. This can be an effective way to get less savvy newbies to abandon ideas that could threaten the status-quo. some vets realize that rocking the boat could jeopardize their power, so this is a very effective way to thwart those pesky little upstarts that actually want to change things. - we're still leveraging archaic software methodologies from last century (read: waterfall). in some cases we claim to be "doing agile" but dividing work into sprints and then doing long and arduous stand-ups does not agile make. When all ideas come from the top and teams are not empowered to change ideas during the implementation phase, so it's waterfall with lipstick.

Cons

Nest had a huge year with the acquisition by Google, acquisition of Dropcam, international expansion, and incredible growth of the workforce. I think the company is feeling some growing pains at this time; however, it is understandable when a company more than doubles in less than a year. Also, perhaps some teams are too demanding. Hopefully we see this level out as more people join teams and off load some of the work, but at times people on certain teams might not have the work-life balance they'd prefer.

Cons

Perfectionists: Everyone here is an A+ player, A- work is considered a bit of a faliure. We are trying to optimize in every direction. This can lead to some functional conflict around how to prioritize points that cannot be optimized at the same time. Also, the drive to perfection can sometimes seemingly slow down development, but personally I'd rather ship excellent product a little later than a mediocre product today. From past experience, this is pretty typical in high performing teams... First Line Management: Some percentage of the first line managers is less seasoned then the senior executives, but is being continuously trained and improving. They occasionally make some 'new manager' type judgement errors. Nothing really terrible, but this can sometimes rub people the wrong way in the lower ranks.

Cons

As others have mentioned, Tony is a micromanager, and too many decisions flow through him. Time spent making and perfecting Keynote slides could be put to better use somewhere else. With the company expanding fast after the Google acquisition, there are definitely some growing pains and confusion about who's responsible for what. And there's a bit of an always-on-call mentality - when something needs to be done, it usually needs to be done now. That said, management seems to be aware of most of these cons - and are actively working to improve on some of them. Bottom line - if you're willing to work hard, you can get get a year's worth of experience in just a few months alongside some of the smartest people in the business.

Cons

I really can't say as I only spent two months as an intern

Cons

We did have some struggles post acquisition trying to find out place within Google, but Alphabet had helped make that very clear. There has been pressure on the team to launch new products which I fully get and hopefully Nest can re earn the respect from the press as we introduce new products

Cons

Plan projects and resources more carefully. We seem to have a very low threshold to say yes to new projects and a very high threshold to cancel and move on.

Cons

Sometimes difficult to align between HQ in the USA and EMEA, getting local needs on the map was difficult as is often the case with California based tech companies.

Cons

Resources are spread too thin, so there are times when workload increases