Why supporting your developers matters

🚧 Developers
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Reposting here because I think it's an important topic @dan.t

I find it really odd that I ask questions and people respond as if I'm mandating or demanding. I find this behavior baffling. No company should do anything unless they are required by law, or they determine it provides value to them. Value could be determined any way they want.

Likewise, I as a developer should do what benefits me. Whether or not I will invest my time in adding drivers for devices which are widely requested, but expensive/time-consuming to develop and support will depend on whether it provides value to me.

Lots of companies make vague statements indicating that it's a feature to come, and yet the truth is that it's not a priority for them nor will be any time in the future. I've lost a lot of time and effort building tools for Wink, Iris, and Abode, and so I'm on my 4th hub and have been burned by the lack of transparency in the past. So I plan to be more careful to invest my time and energy in a project which is transparent about their priorities.

Hubitat doesn't have to do anything. But should they choose to be more transparent about their priorities, it allows me to align my expectations and determine my own level of investment appropriately.

Here is a good point of contrast. Apple is one of the most closed companies in the world. They won't admit what they are shipping, when, or how. However I can at any time make a query to them about future support of their libraries/interfaces and get back a response indicating if that feature is planned for improvement soon (they only do 6 month timelines), in maintenance, or is being deprecated. No, Apple is absolutely not committing to delivering anything to me. There is no promise there. But they understand that as a developer I want to know which toolsets are going to be priorities going forward.

One of the drivers I'm working on would be utterly idiotic to implement in a network with S0 security in use. It's going to take some time and effort to get the features built out so I'm not stressed about right now... but I want to know where S2 falls in the timeline. If I spent 40 hours building and testing this driver (that might be a low estimate) and then it turns out that S2 isn't going to be delivered until the next generation of hardware... and they haven't even started thinking about the next generation of hardware yet... boom, we're looking at late 2020 if not 2021 and I get burned again.

This is why simple statements like "we currently believe it can be implemented in the current hardware but are still testing that theory" and "it's in our short term roadmap" could guide my investment. Likewise, telling me "we have bigger problems to solve so this is likely going to be punted to a future roadmap" tells me not to waste my time now.

No, they don't have to do anything. But they might find value in helping their developers understand their priorities.

Post note: closing the topic every time I ask what they're going to do in the future is I guess the statement they've chosen to make about whether or not developing S2 is going to happen in any short term pipeline.

It's amazing that small companies like Hubitat think that this early in their development they are worthy of investment because of who they are, not what they can be doing. I've sat on too many hubs that failed to deliver to keep investing my time this way.

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TLDR;
S2 support is very important to him, and he is annoyed that Hubitat won't tell him exactly when it will be fully supported.

:+1:

Good luck on whatever hub you move to that meets your needs more fully.

In the end everyone votes with their wallet.

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I absolutely did not say anything about exactly when. I have entire paragraphs talking about the difference between a commitment and a direction/focus, and yet you toss this accusation out.

Is it too much to ask that we behave like adults? My post was both thoughtful and considerate. Try it out.

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I feel like they've given you a pretty straightforward answer on S2 at this point. Judging by recent posts, it's pretty important to you, but S2 seemingly won't be a part of this hub's Z-wave implementation for the foreseeable future.

I'd raise a couple small points from someone that isn't a developer at all.

I don't think you should take it personally that that other thread was closed. You kept engaging with someone that was trolling you, the thread got way off topic and pretty nasty, it was closed. Reasonable thing to do, IMO.

And I think they have actual investors, even though they're small. So while I'm certainly not discounting the value that community developers add to platforms like this by investing their time into it, they have their own priorities and they can choose whether or not to share them with us as the users/consumers of their product.

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This topic keeps getting closed because it is not furthering the subject that you originally raised. We have given the answer to your question: S2 is very important to us, development work is and has been underway, and there is no more than that we are willing to disclose at this time.

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And yet @dan.t thought it meant the opposite, thus my confusion. (and see @bravenel's post below this which indicates that it is a priority)

Perhaps they should have blocked the troller instead? But that didn't surprise me. That was going nowhere. I was actually referring to this thread, where it stayed technical and I was trying to respond to @dan.t's post quoted above Z-Wave S2 support requirements and timeline - #8

Absolutely. That's what I said-- they have to decide what the value point is. I'm making a case that telling your developers what you intend to support in the near future versus what you have no current plans to support in the near future (in as vague of terms as they wish to make those statements) would provide value to us. It's a simple enough thing.

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Thank you! That is all that I was asking for.

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Re-read my statement. I did not say anything to the opposite, I tried to provide a different perspective and apparently I failed in that attempt.

Anyhow, I done with the topic. You got your answer

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From a consumer point of view, the issue is exactly the same.

It does not make sense to invest money in a product like this, when there are free alternatives. That is, except if your investment gives you some leverage to actually be able to demand something from your product and the company behind it.

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I'm not sure I see your point. When I purchase something I'll use as a consumer only, I purchase for what it can do. There's no ongoing investment on my part. Unless I paid for ongoing service contract, I don't feel that the vendor owes me anything beyond delivery and support of the product I bought.

It's all different when there are APIs and supported interfaces, and I'm contributing code and features back to their product.

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"Hubitat doesn't have to do anything. But should they choose to be more transparent about their priorities, it allows me to align my expectations and determine my own level of investment appropriately."

There are many threads within the forum which are transparent and blatantly state the direction, priorities and driving objectives. From a modest sample of it, a reasonable set of expectations can be, and have been, drawn. This company principals and support personel has been very clear from the start and continue to do so.

I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I think your statement is fair. You have a right to set your own expectations based on 1) whatever information is presented to you, 2) information you have found through research and 3) information in the form of opinions from experienced users. All of that is already here.

It seems that you are very frustrated with the ever evolving landscape of IOT and are trying to get a foothold so as not to have to change again to a 5th hub unnecessarily. It's a reasonable frustration.

In the end, posting multiple threads as leverage to trying and change the information, sparse as it might be, will only lead to more frustration amongst your posting peers. As one, I have a reasonable expectation that deliberate and respectful conversations will be engaged in, and will come to a reasonable end.

I hope you take this in the respectful and nurturing tone it was written with. I'm not prone to commenting on these types of things, but I'm finding myself pushed to the brink due to the continued appearance of postings that range from discourteous to amazingly rude and petulant. I'm not saying this is one, I'm only stating what is driving me to write this. I hope all who read this will continue to make these forums a place where we can all engage and enjoy, grow and have a good laugh once in a while.

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I'm really ready to let this conversation die, but the more I think about the past few days of interactions the less happy I am about them. @homeauto2112's reply here captured the problem quite well, although I don't quite know what he meant at the end. So I'm going to try and sort this one out for clarity sake.

In general, yes Hubitat team had been very clear. There was not a statement about S2 delivery at the time I posted the "silence is deafening" comment (I did search). There were 2 threads which had asked the question, and had gotten no answer at all. I don't think it's fair to say this specific question was already answered. In truth, given how open the team had been about priorities in the past, the lack of answer on this topic seemed to imply a very different answer than they ultimately gave.

When @bravenel replied to my "silence" statement saying S2 was in the plans, numerous people read it one way ("not any time soon") and others read it differently ("active development right now"). Given that several core team members have been expressively dismissive of secure pairing, I felt it was worth getting a clarification.

No, I'm certain there will be a 5th hub and a 6th hub. It's evolving way too fast for that not to happen. :sweat_smile: Hubitat doesn't have an IDE or test libs or anything, so I'm having to build up a groovy development environment, create my own unit test framework, etc. It's a fair bit of effort. I just wanted to avoid tossing a lot of effort building out a Hubitat development environment and learning the driver interface if they were adamant against, or had technical issues that prevented, S2 support appearing in the next year.

It was never a demand for "when", just a request to clarify if it was truly on the roadmap or just sitting in the backlog.

I'm having trouble parsing this paragraph. It sounds like you're saying I wasn't deliberate or respectful. I certainly had tried to be.

Every time I asked a serious technical question clarifying my concerns, many responses were deliberately rude, insulting, or completely irrelevant. Threads were being closed down for going down a rathole, which I totally understand isn't a benefit to anyone... but the (clear) respectful and deliberate answers weren't there.

Your tone was great. I wish I could write things that read this well :wink: . Unfortunately, it does leave me wondering what behavior is offending you. It would appear by context that you're saying I'm being discourteous, rude, and petulant... which I truly didn't intend to be.

When I see dismissive, rude, and insulting responses to technical questions... frankly, it's pretty much burned me out. I put aside active development of the drivers/testing until my mood improved. But when I see statements like you've made above, it really makes me wonder what it is you want.

If technical development-focused queries are bad, and trolling and insults are to be expected, and that my attempts to have technical focus conversations are "driving you to the brink"...

Seriously, this is what I've been questioning this week. Is this the norm here?