Samsung has plenty of money to pay the appropriate level of compensation to make up for the Cost of Living differences in California – 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 bucket… Especially if you grab a few bucks out of the $200 million already sunk in by Samsung.
It’s not the new hires that should be the concern at this point. 
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Samsung just has to wait until Apple’s Home Kit becomes available so they can copy it just like they have copied everything else that Apple has done.
Hold on, partners.
You’re making the critical error in thinking that throwing more people at the problem will fix the problem sooner. I’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 they’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, can’t tell if this is an issue, because we don’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 doesn’t help. Probably doesn’t help to toss in snark about Apple, either. Apple is not immune to problems, and bluntly, many of us can’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 sayin’ … for every failure, there is a reason, and for every excuse, there is a solution.
Significantly unstable? I’ll grant you “unstable”, 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 it’s not the first time, so I can’t label the hub as “stable”.
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 I’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. I’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 won’t be drop kicking my hub through the window.
I don’t work for the company, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time in defense, because I’m right in the middle of taxes, and I’m irritated as it is. But fairness forces me to say that, as long as the company is aware and working, I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt.
And do note that I’m the one who is saying the system is under massive load. I don’t believe the ST people have ever said this, themselves, or gave any such excuse. At least, not that I’ve seen.
The most they do is acknowledge problems, look into problems, and announce workarounds and new updates.
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I’ll let Customers “as a whole” decide what adjectives they wish to use to define the level of “instability” of the product / platform.
Brook’s Law: “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
(Or my favorite: “nine women can’t make a baby in a month”)
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But this isn’t a “late software project”.
Instead consider that fresh new eyes can solve many problems.
French novelist Marcel Proust wrote that, “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.”
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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