Nest Employee Reviews about "team"

Cons

HR team is really lacking. The atmosphere has been very negative and people are across the teams are unhappy (probably the reason so many people are leaving). There are also people in leadership who probably shouldn't be there. They also write fake glassdoor reviews. A lot of the 5 star ones you see aren't accurate.

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

Still going through growing pain A bigger startup which comes with a lot of work

Cons

The original Nest software infrastructure platform was complicated and had a lot of technical debt. This is rapidly changing with the investing in a state of the art platform showing great results.

Cons

The biggest challenge here is there is so much that needs to be done. The hard weeks are when everything seems to come at you at once. Sometimes it feels like you have to block time and sneak away to get some serious heads down work down.

Cons

- Oh well, an experience that prepares you for the worst in life. Abusive environment that gets you psychologically strong. What's not to like? All the better if you've been a star performer all your life academically/professionally - this place will tear you down in as little as six months. Be prepared for semi-deserving "tech leads" and "managers" to show you are a not-so-valuable employee who churns out dirt. After all, that's what Steve Jobs did to the folks he worked with too, no? So isn't it great that you are getting a taste of that? Watching semi-competent fully-arrogant pre-acquisition insiders get promoted while you slog away and build products for them and still get slammed for not being good enough. And then you go to Google and recalibrate yourself, going through PTSD for a year or two before you realize you were really fine, and get a sense of what a "normal" work environment feels like.

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

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

Competitive teams rather than collaborative

Cons

Sometimes, the work environment was almost too relaxed and things were not as productive as they could be.