Announcement: Changes to scheduler history in IDE

Thatā€™s the catchā€¦ ā€œaffordableā€. I am a DBA in Orlando, and my lifestyle would change so much by moving to Cali.

edit: Lifestyle change would not for the betterā€¦

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Work remote for ST and help fix their issues. We will all be very grateful :yum:

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Seriously though, thatā€™s what weā€™ve resorted to doing in some cases. You can hire 2 people in St Louis for the price of 1 in NYC or LA. :smile:

Funny thing is, I have glanced at the positions beforeā€¦ But I really feel the benefit of working at SmartThings is the partnership of people ā€œon-siteā€. I personally thrive in that.

I am not surprised, the activity hitting your system must be massive. Iā€™m constantly amazed at how noisy the smart devices are. Theyā€™re always calling home. This on top of the manual, scheduled, Alexa, IFTTT, etc-driven events and activity.

You should experiment around with what you can and cannot drop, to see if you can cut the noise. And we should be understanding of such efforts, especially since youā€™re good about communicating them.

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Curious: are you guys still using Cassandra?

Yes


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Iā€™ve seen a presentation by an engineer for SmartThings, I can say with surety, SmartThings has very capable system people.

Frankly, I feel antiquated next to them. Sigh.

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Migration to Cassandra, which happened in October 2014, was billed as a fix-it-once-and-for-all for platform performance issues. My feeling is that stability today is no better, if not worse, than it was 15 month ago. :frowning:

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Samsung has plenty of money to pay the appropriate level of compensation to make up for the Cost of Living differences in California ā€“ but whether or not they actually offer / pay new hires sufficiently is unknown to me.

So what? Divide the salary over a couple million Customers (now and future) and the investment is a drop in the bucketā€¦ Especially if you grab a few bucks out of the $200 million already sunk in by Samsung.

Itā€™s not the new hires that should be the concern at this point. :speak_no_evil:

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Samsung just has to wait until Appleā€™s Home Kit becomes available so they can copy it just like they have copied everything else that Apple has done.

Hold on, partners.

Youā€™re making the critical error in thinking that throwing more people at the problem will fix the problem sooner. Iā€™ve often found that throwing new people at a problem just adds more people wringing their hands over the same problem.

If ST is understaffed, the people are overworked, and theyā€™ll reach a breaking point and then it will be obvious more people are needed. Good people are hard to find, and people pushed to the breaking point are people who find jobs elsewhere. This is, so-to-speak, a self-healing problem.

We, on the outside, canā€™t tell if this is an issue, because we donā€™t know if the problem has to do with staffing, or weaknesses in the underlying technology, or exponential growth in usage that requires infrastructure changes.

So tossing in unasked for advice doesnā€™t help. Probably doesnā€™t help to toss in snark about Apple, either. Apple is not immune to problems, and bluntly, many of us canā€™t afford the Apple triple-charge tax anyway.

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Nobody is forcing Samsung to keep selling more and more SmartThings Hubs while the system is significantly unstable. Nobody forced Samsung to push 3 major releases on the same day in September 2015 (Hub V2, App V2, and UK domain).

Just sayinā€™ ā€¦ for every failure, there is a reason, and for every excuse, there is a solution.

Significantly unstable? Iā€™ll grant you ā€œunstableā€, in that there are re-occurring problems, but to me, significant means unusable. For the most part, my hub works. My routines work. The events happen. But, I do have problems. I had one this AM that I discussed elsewhere, and itā€™s not the first time, so I canā€™t label the hub as ā€œstableā€.

However, your experience can differ from mine, so you may have a significantly unstable hub.

The V2 hubs came out four months ago. During that time, the holidays happened and Iā€™m assuming devices were given as gifts. So they had a new device that came out just before an event triggering a significant growth. Not a choice I would have made if I were in charge, but such is life.

I can get peeved at problems, especially when alarms go off at 6AM on Christmas Eve. But in fairness, I also have to understand that the development team was hit with a double whammy. Iā€™ve been a systems/software engineer for an uncomfortable number of years, and I know what can happen when you have a release of a new product just before that product is going to get a new, and larger, audience.

As long as ST acknowledges problems, and shows they are working towards a solution, I, personally, will be giving them a break. And I wonā€™t be drop kicking my hub through the window.

I donā€™t work for the company, and Iā€™m not going to spend a lot of time in defense, because Iā€™m right in the middle of taxes, and Iā€™m irritated as it is. But fairness forces me to say that, as long as the company is aware and working, Iā€™m giving it the benefit of the doubt.

And do note that Iā€™m the one who is saying the system is under massive load. I donā€™t believe the ST people have ever said this, themselves, or gave any such excuse. At least, not that Iā€™ve seen.

The most they do is acknowledge problems, look into problems, and announce workarounds and new updates.

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Iā€™ll let Customers ā€œas a wholeā€ decide what adjectives they wish to use to define the level of ā€œinstabilityā€ of the product / platform.

Brookā€™s Law: ā€œadding manpower to a late software project makes it laterā€
(Or my favorite: ā€œnine women canā€™t make a baby in a monthā€)

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But this isnā€™t a ā€œlate software projectā€.

Instead consider that fresh new eyes can solve many problems.

French novelist Marcel Proust wrote that, ā€œThe real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.ā€

When the same problems exist in a software solution for a significant period of time, there is a flawed development process or insufficient technical talent (not enough, not enough experience, not smart enough, etc) to solve the problem or both. That is my experience. Nobody is arguing that running a massive real time system like this is easy. However Samsung has the money and like others are saying, they continue to exacerbate the problem by selling more hubs. That is to be expected as that is how they make money. The scheduling problem, for one, is completely unacceptable to the vast majority of users. Spend the money, fix the problem.

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