Re:Google says Nest’s built-in mic not listed in specs was n...
by dspillett on Wednesday February 20, 2019 @05:18AM
(#19206892)
You are assuming that the people talking to us have any chance of knowing. Even in a company with a relatively flat hierarchy there are walls of "they don't need/want to know that detail" between the engineers & budgeting[1] and top-brass & marketing. Sometimes this comes from the technical side ("I won't include that detail, it'll only confuse them") sometimes the other way ("That huge document you sent through, could you distil it down to a side or two of key points?").
I suppose they could try to instil a whistle-blowing culture whereby people are rewarded for highlighting potential problems list this to other silos[2], but then like external bug bounties you get into a new family of argument about what the problem is worth, who truly found it first, and the race to be first will lead to a lot of noise around any useful signal.
[1] the engineers will know it is there as they are designing the thing, the money people will know as they will have been involved in the "it is cheaper to just leave it and disable it than to redesign it out" decision-making process.
[2] no matter how flat/heterogenus/other-all-together-now-buzzword-compliant-word-of-the-momemtn a company claims to be, there will be siloed groups within it, and within them like Russian dolls in larger organisations.
> how on earth do they think they deserve trust
They probably don't, individually. They are like us, with similar concerns.
But they don't need to think they deserve it individually as long as the company overall can convince enough of us that they do (and convince enough of us that will never be convinced of that, that it doesn't really matter in the long run anyway).
I suppose they could try to instil a whistle-blowing culture whereby people are rewarded for highlighting potential problems list this to other silos[2], but then like external bug bounties you get into a new family of argument about what the problem is worth, who truly found it first, and the race to be first will lead to a lot of noise around any useful signal.
[1] the engineers will know it is there as they are designing the thing, the money people will know as they will have been involved in the "it is cheaper to just leave it and disable it than to redesign it out" decision-making process.
[2] no matter how flat/heterogenus/other-all-together-now-buzzword-compliant-word-of-the-momemtn a company claims to be, there will be siloed groups within it, and within them like Russian dolls in larger organisations.
> how on earth do they think they deserve trust
They probably don't, individually. They are like us, with similar concerns.
But they don't need to think they deserve it individually as long as the company overall can convince enough of us that they do (and convince enough of us that will never be convinced of that, that it doesn't really matter in the long run anyway).