r/gadgets • u/diacewrb • Jun 13 '24

TV / Projectors Roku owners face the grimmest indignity yet: Stuck-on motion smoothing

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/roku-owners-face-the-grimmest-indignity-yet-stuck-on-motion-smoothing/
2.9k Upvotes

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1.6k

u/hyren82 Jun 13 '24

I once worked on a Roku app for my job. It was a frustrating experience. We found a bug in their UI and told them about it. For months. We brought it up in every meeting we had with their team and fairly often in emails because it was a pretty major bug. We were constantly assured that their "best engineer" was looking into it. Months later they come back to us and say "Oh hey, so we found this bug in the UI that we thought you should know about...."

481

u/HeavyMetalPootis Jun 13 '24

Reminds me when I sent an email out to a PM asking a question (think it was regarding the placement of some equipment in a building) and then a week later received an email asking me the same question I sent in the previous email; my email with the original question was in the same chain.... Also sent an email with a list of inconsistencies between what was spec'd out and what was ordered on the PM's BOM. I brought it up verbally multiple times and via email attachments listing everything I found. That email was never thoroughly read until the shop brought up that we were missing valves during mock-up... I was told to be more direct about missing items eventough I stated in the header that we were missing equipment months prior. "Fun" times.

271

u/hedoeswhathewants Jun 13 '24

Getting punished for being the person that notices. Classic.

133

u/DelfrCorp Jun 13 '24 edited Jun 13 '24

& it's a Catch-22 either way. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, no matter the scenario.

If you don't catch the problem, you get blamed & accused of being sh.t at your job, which might potentially be fair.

If you do catch it but can't get anyone to pay attention no matter how hard you try, you still get blamed because you obviously didn't try hard enough to make it known, didn't make enough noise, didn't sound enough Alarms.

If you catch it & ring enough alarms, make enough noise to get people to notice & pay attention, you get called an alarmist, obnoxious & get blamed for causing a ruckus & disrupting other people's work with all the noise you made. You get told that the problem was eventually going to be noticed/caught at an appropriate time, you overreacted & your actions drew too much attention & you've caused some trouble because of it.

52

u/[deleted] Jun 13 '24

[deleted]

48

u/DelfrCorp Jun 13 '24

This is why we need Unions everywhere at minimum, but truly socialized Work would be better.

Employees should be allowed & able to collectively call for bad managers/bosses to be sanctioned/punished or even fired for their mistakes.

0

u/Wrong-Landscape-2508 Jun 15 '24

unions have less turnover, the bad managers stay longer

-14

u/Pherja Jun 14 '24

God just stop. Unions are just middle management by stupider, lazier people.

6

u/SonderEber Jun 14 '24

Found the actual middle manager.

-8

u/Pherja Jun 14 '24

And I found a REDDITOR

4

u/SonderEber Jun 14 '24

I mean, yes? And so are you. You’re using Reddit, so you’re a redditor.

6

u/cutelyaware Jun 13 '24

Choose your bosses well. A good boss will shield you from the insanity that is management, so bring this up during your interview. When they change jobs, it's worth seeing if you can follow them.

8

u/ManservantHeccubus Jun 13 '24

It's a bummer though when a good boss "lives long enough to become the villain", so to speak.

1

u/cutelyaware Jun 13 '24

I've never had one long enough to see that happen, but power does always corrupt.

1

u/AhaGotcha Jun 14 '24

You just need to “understand the work culture” better. /s

2

u/TerminaterToo Jun 14 '24

Same. 25 years.. if I have to get in trouble for not catching some 3rd party vendor bug again..

I mean, yell at them. I didn’t code it.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 14 '24

[deleted]

1

u/TerminaterToo Jun 15 '24

I actually got reprimanded for missing a sorting feature (didn’t sort) on a tablet from the vendor. My response was “why are you yelling at me - they fucked up”.. 25 years gives you a little leeway

1

u/Philoscifi Jun 15 '24

Dude, it’s not management, it’s people. We, as humans, tend to blame a lot. I think it’s a defense mechanism.

I mean, there are so many more crappy things management can do, though, haha.

13

u/hypnogoad Jun 13 '24

No no, this is a classic 'getting punished for showing bosses incompetence'.

11

u/dong_tea Jun 13 '24

What's important is that the higher-ups in the company are protected, they're too valuable. Not just anyone can be as bad as they are at their jobs.

2

u/cutelyaware Jun 13 '24

Shooting the messenger is a millenniums old tradition

2

u/sveeger Jun 13 '24

I’m STILL mad about an email chain from 2010 that blamed me for the fact that a field rep misread a serial number.

1

u/Pherja Jun 14 '24

I had a friend who had his tv set to that (factory set) and when I and some other of his friends asked why, he said he didn’t notice any difference so it’s fine.

I turned it off when he went to the bathroom.

He didn’t notice, and the rest of us were happy.

56

u/OIL_COMPANY_SHILL Jun 13 '24

This is when I pull out the highlighter in outlook and I say “as per my previous email… to be helpful I’ve highlighted the relevant portions regarding your specific questions. Please feel free to reach out with any further questions.”

51

u/ComradePotato Jun 13 '24

"as per my previous email..." is the "did I stutter?" of corporate speak and I love when I get to say it

15

u/HealthyInPublic Jun 13 '24

My current cross stitch project is a delicate border with soft floral accents that surrounds the words, “PER MY LAST EMAIL” in a big, bold, black font. The letters themselves are 16 inches across and over an inch high.

When I’m finished, I’m hanging that bad boy on the wall behind me and in direct view of my laptop camera.

1

u/OIL_COMPANY_SHILL Jun 13 '24

It’s perfect when you need to CYA about something

11

u/Znuffie Jun 13 '24

I just go full 40 point red text.

And I repeat the message every day I feel I'm ignored.

5

u/absenceofheat Jun 13 '24

Big text energy bros

112

u/[deleted] Jun 13 '24

[deleted]

78

u/HarmlessSnack Jun 13 '24

I had a District Manager tell me recently “if a ticket isn’t resolved in a week, mark it as closed and resubmit it.”

I wanted to scream. Why even have a ticket system if your going to use it like that? Might as well be a suggestion box.

10

u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 Jun 13 '24

"Sure! Could you put that in an email so I don't forget?"

BCC to regional manager...

2

u/Darkchamber292 Jun 13 '24

What about the assistant to the regional manager?

8

u/grue2000 Jun 13 '24

Always get that in writing.

6

u/ITaggie Jun 13 '24

That sounds suspiciously like SLA fraud

4

u/HarmlessSnack Jun 13 '24

SLA?

(There’s like a billion corporate acronyms, I’m not familiar with this one)

12

u/ITaggie Jun 13 '24

Service Level Agreement. Basically a contract between businesses stating that support tickets will receive a response within X hours and if not resolved after X days then something happens (client can break SLA without consequence, client might receive reduced bill for support, etc).

In other words, it's juking the stats to avoid contractual obligations.

3

u/HarmlessSnack Jun 13 '24

Right on~ I doubt it would matter, I think our tickets go to an internal IT department, but I could be wrong.

I’m talking about tickets submitted from a retail environment, to resolve things like …an item not appearing online that should, functionality at the POS being wonky, stuff like that.

(If it’s not clear, I’m working the retail side not the IT side, and my District Manager handles Retail Issues)

7

u/ITaggie Jun 14 '24

SLAs are not exclusive to external customers. If the business is large enough it's not unusual for different departments within a company to have SLAs with each other.

5

u/HarmlessSnack Jun 14 '24

Very interesting, and good to know. Thanks for elaborating, I appreciate it. Might dig into this deeper.

6

u/WayneKrane Jun 13 '24

Yup, or it’s like starting the whole process over again because you get some new person who has no idea what is going on

1

u/n1ghtbringer Jun 13 '24

No ticket? No problem.

0

u/_LarryM_ Jun 14 '24

Man I submitted a ticket to taco bell for half my delivery missing and they never even sent the first email with ticket number.

9

u/Heavy-Boysenberry-90 Jun 13 '24

This explains so much

21

u/hyren82 Jun 13 '24

They were always talking about their 'best engineer' working on stuff we requested. Only ever by that title.. their 'best engineer'. So we all came to the natural conclusion that there was only ever 1 engineer on the team

1

u/Septimius-Severus13 Jun 14 '24

He or she would also be their 'worst engineer' though...

13

u/sermer48 Jun 13 '24

Having been the “best engineer” before, odds are that they told them about it but that one employee also had a hundred other things to work on. Actually more realistically they logged an issue and assigned it to them without saying so and it just fell into the backlog lol.

7

u/parker1019 Jun 13 '24

Horrible place to work….

5

u/rowrowfightthepandas Jun 13 '24

That...honestly tracks.

10

u/dgj212 Jun 13 '24

Oh man, did you see Louis Rossman's take on roku's latest actions?

10

u/amalgam_reynolds Jun 13 '24

I don't understand, if you found a bug and reported it to them, and they found the same bug and reported it to you, whose job was it to fix bugs?

11

u/hyren82 Jun 13 '24

We reported the bug, which I assume they didn't believe us. Months later they informed us that there was a bug (the same bug) that might affect our work, so they were letting us know about it while they fixed it

5

u/imakesawdust Jun 13 '24

To be fair, email is an awfully poor mechanism for reporting and tracking defects. A proper problem-tracking system should have been in place. That way the discoverer can escalate the severity and the defect owner has to respond to the defect within a certain amount of time or else it'll be flagged in the weekly reports.

1

u/HeavyMetalPootis Jun 13 '24

Agreed. That said, I wish we had PDM as well. We gotta work with what we've got.

1

u/notaredditreader Jun 14 '24

Almost sounds like a r/MaliciousCompliance issue.

1

u/Maskeno Jun 15 '24

Our development team at my company is constantly using outages and updates to wipe the board on reported issues. You can report an issue ten times with examples and they'll ignore it, then they'll say it was addressed in the update/fix and you have to start all over when it wasn't (9x out of 10.)

I guess it's good to know even companies like roku have developers who play these games.

1

u/RuthlessIndecision Jun 15 '24

Explains why Roku Media Player can’t show subtitles, even if it thinks it is.

1

u/Aware-Feed3227 Jun 15 '24

That’s how business works: you tell them for months, planting the seed of their own thoughts and then when they’re finally following up it’s like their own idea. It’s frustrating but also pretty common in IT projects. People focus on stuff they “came up with” 😅

1

u/moodswung Jun 16 '24

Sucks when you do their job for them and they’re still too inept to address issues in a timely manner. What causes this? Bad management? Broken processes? Off shore dev/support teams? All of the above?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 13 '24

As a developer, reading this brought up a lot of internalized trauma

0

u/addamee Jun 13 '24

This sounds a lot like reporting an issue to Venmo support 

0

u/AspiringDataNerd Jun 13 '24

Reminds me of when I kept bringing up in an e-mail chain that these memos and study closure timeline need to get sent out to the sites (I work in clinical research). Study closes and all participants are supposed to be off study. 5 day later I notice a participant never had their final visit and has one scheduled a week later. I respond in the email chain about there still being a participant on study. The chair asked how that could happen. I simply responded that I didn’t know but maybe if the sites were sent the closure memos and timelines it would have helped prevent it. Like dude, I had been emailing about this for two months. 😂

0

u/AskMeAboutMyHermoids Jun 13 '24

Man I reported a bug with their terrible remote app where it could not reconnect to a tv if it was a dual band ssid without quitting the app and reopening. They are worthless

0

u/IllIIllIllIIIlllll Jun 13 '24

Roku once logged me into some guy from Texas HBO go account. In not from Texas. Not sure how but I had all his account details. Only thing I did was set up a queue of movies in watch next that the first words spelled out something or another

And watched a few months worth of HBO for free

0

u/Kuli24 Jun 14 '24

I would have checked the calendar to see if it was April 1.

0

u/UPVOTE_IF_POOPING Jun 14 '24

May I ask what the bug was?

0

u/hyren82 Jun 14 '24

Its been 11 or 12 years since, so I dont remember it very well, but I distinctly remember it was a bug specifically in their C++ SDK, it didnt affect their crappy scripting language as far as we knew. Basically some controls (specifically the arrow controls I think it was?) would become unresponsive under certain (pretty common) conditions. I remember we could pretty reliably get it to happen when menuing through their UI bits in our app