As a Nest engineer, I won't say any numbers that aren't public, but this company is already on deathwatch. Once that happens, most people will quickly have shiny paperweights because it's a constant firefight keeping these systems up. We have $340M in revenue, not profit, against a ~$500M budget. No new products since the purchase, and sales/growth numbers are dire. Our budget deal expires soon, and all the good engineers on my teams have discreetly indicated they are going to flee once their golden handcuffs unlock (many have already left despite sacrificing a lot of money to do so).

Tony and his goons demand crazy timelines so much that "crunch time" has basically lost meaning. Just when your labor bears fruit, they swoop in, 180 the specs you just delivered on, then have the gall to call your team "incompetent" for not reading their mind and delivering on these brand-new specs. I waste most of my time in pointless meetings, or defending my teams so they don't flip their desks and walk out. People fall asleep in corners and cry in the bathrooms, health and marriages are suffering. Already the churn is insane, close to half the company if not more. Skilled engineers can tell the environment is toxic, so we're filling vacancies with mostly sub-par talent.

Tony, you can't hide anything from engineers. We know how many units are actually being sold, how many subscriptions lapse, how many fail or get returned. We know about that time-bomb flaw you ignored so people will have to upgrade. We can see the data in those executive dashboards you think we don't know about. But go ahead, keep trashing us in public. We dare you to tell everyone just how much of that $340M was due to a simple Dropcam rebrand, and not the thermostats and smoke alarms. Good luck shipping that critical new project after restarting it for the umpteenth time.

Ah, that feels better. Now off to the other 4 meetings I have today.

EDIT: Oh god I thought I was just venting my spleen a bit, this got way more attention than I wanted... news sites are blowing up my PMs, but I have already said too much. There are many people in Nest across all the divisions who could have written these comments and I hope someone who is less paranoid than I, or already fully vested/gone, will come forward as time goes on.

Honestly I'm more afraid that I was too vague and someone innocent will get an unfriendly visit tomorrow, or we'll have some creepy new internal policy (step up!), because the higher ups are pretty vicious about this sort of thing.

I'm still proud of what my teams have accomplished at Nest. A lot of engineers, managers, and support staff have built something really cool. The cloud services are slick, and the hardware is beautiful, even if you operate local-only for those products that can still function that way.