An increasing number of people asking for help on the forum seem to be using device triggers in automations, when this is rarely appropriate. The discussion here suggests that this is largely because of the design of the UI, which presents a list of possible trigger types in alphabetical order. Device is at the top, while the most common triggers, state and numeric_state, are some way down.
I would like to request a re-ordering of the UI list - perhaps in order of frequency of use.
It’s completely stupid that this isn’t already the case. Worth noting the “Device” trigger has the description text: “Great way to start.”, when in fact, it is a very misguided way to start. Home Assistant devs (yes the ones employed by HA, stop using the cop-out that this is a community project even though it pays your salaries), do you think that Automation is a beginner (by HA standards) feature or an intermediate feature? Think about your demographic for a second: you have to be somewhat technical to even become a beginner at HA; and likely by the time you create your first automation you are an intermediate user. Now, you can become an intermediate user without ever touching YAML, but I find it highly suspect that a user who doesn’t even know what an entity is should touch the automation feature. Given this, who exactly is benefiting from your misleading and incorrect advice to use a Device trigger as a “Great way to start.”?
I don’t think the insults and entitlement are constructive.
Have a look at the current beta release notes to see the massive amount of recent changes…
While I agree that this issue should be fixed, one cannot ignore the fact that there are tons to do.
Plus, the community can actually contribute changes.
I understand and I think you are right, but I would like to note that those of us who are paid to do our jobs tend to be held to a higher standard. It feels very dishonest to me that Home Assistant’s usability problems are often couched as “it’s a volunteer project so we won’t fix it”, and the paid and spammy Nabu Casa (Home Assistant Cloud ™) product are couched as “supporting the volunteer work”. Thus, I chose to overreact in the other direction. I will take your admonishment to heart though.
As a former Product Manager of a commercial software company I can tell you that when you have two million (!) installations, there is no way you can set priorities in a way that the majority of users is happy. It is simple math.
Nabu Casa lists less than 50 employees on LinkedIn. That is one employee per 40,000 installations… If one dev helps the 15 people that voted for this request, then 39,985 people are left waiting. Per developer. The list of things that people want is endless. And Nabu Casa does not have anywhere near 50 developers.
Yet I have never heard any of them say "it’s a volunteer project so we won’t fix it”. They also do not hang out here much. Those that do hang out here, like me, are volunteers.
All we do is try to help people like you work around the annoyances that the requests signal, and try to manage expectations. What we are saying is, if you want someone to develop it now, doing it yourself is the only guarantee you will ever get to make it come true. Much is contributed this way. Volunteers can set their own priorities.
Because fixing this does not bring any new functionality, chances of it being done soon are somewhat smaller. But who knows, in WTH month you might get heards. Until then, know that feature requests are no longer maintained here but on Github. Devs rarely ever come here.
Also, people at Nabu Casa are thinking hard on how to improve the automation editor. Maybe they will come up with ways that make this request obsolete.
This is actually what I’m talking about. I respect you and other volunteers giving your time to help others. That’s not to say that all of you are always respectful though — plenty of questions are often answered with “why would you do that?”, which in my neck of the woods would be viewed as disrespectful towards the user. The user will use a product however they wish as long as it’s within the supported feature-set.
However, I will pose the question: why am I and other people seemingly less motivated to contribute to Home Assistant Core, even documentation?
I contribute semi-regularly to Wikipedia. They have a staff too at The Wikimedia Foundation, but there’s a key difference between them and Nabu Casa: Wikipedia is not a paid service, and whether or not you donate does not change the end product you receive.
To that end, the business fundamentals are completely different and I am much more willing to donate my time to help make Wikipedia better and more useful for everyone.
The minute Home Assistant decided to commercialize, they began a slippery slope. People are less willing to donate time to a commercial venture, which means HA needs more dedicated staff to maintain the product, and users have higher expectations toward commercial ventures, which means HA needs more dedicated staff to maintain the product, etc.
I come from a tradition of software engineering where we openly sell the product we’re selling, and guess what that means too? We are accountable to our paying customers, even when they get mad at us for something that doesn’t feel like our fault.
As I said in my earlier reply, my main irritation and disgust is with the dishonesty that comes with commercializing while continuing to play pretend as a “community project”. It’s dishonest, lazy, unintelligent, and low-integrity on the part of HA leadership.
I agree with a lot of what you say, except I do not feel Nabu Casa people are dishonest. Sure, they have their own interests, but they are upfront about those as far as I can tell, and I do not blame them for persuing their commercial interests. HA is a community project. Yes, commercial parties contribute. But if you see how many people contribute, it has never stopped being community driven.
Nabu Casa does not stop others to use the product free of charge for commercial purposes. They also do not charge for functionality they develop other than their cloud product and hardware. They allow alternate services to do the same, e.g. with cloud backup.
I recognize this is not the most polite way to ask the why question. But why is a valid question. All too often people ask for a solution without specifying their need. And more often than not it is because they are not aware of alternate, better working solutions that are out there.
Instead of spending a lot of time to describe what they ask, I first want to know why. Because all the effort is lost if it turns out it is not what they need. The proper order is always: Why, what, how. Yet 80% of questions are “How can I…”, or “Why can’t I just do this?”.
I’m Dutch. My countryfolk and I are often described as direct. But it is almost never meant as disrespect or seeking blame or who’s at fault. We do not like to beat a out the bush and cut to the chase. But it is hard to always be alert how that comes across to people with different backgrounds.
Now that is hard not to see as disrespectful, isn’t it? And all this started because of frustration with the fact that a simple wish you have is not fulfilled.
PS. I hve no relation whtsoever to Nabu Casa or it’s employees, other than I enjoy chatting with some of them on occasion.
To get back on topic though, was it already mentioned feature requests are now Github discussions? HA devs (other than the community ones perhaps) won’t see them here.
OK, I accept your point that it’s not all-or-nothing, and that this remains a community project that I personally benefit from. I was wrong to paint HA as a total commercial venture when the commercial aspect is only one part of its total product.
Yes, I understand you’re not affiliated with Nabu Casa, and again I respect you and other volunteers even if I stylistically disagree. I will admit that when I first joined, I incorrectly believed that moderators here were employed by HA. To the extent I would argue with you and other volunteers, it’s as a newer volunteer (me) to a more senior volunteer about how to achieve a shared objective: making the product more usable for ourselves and for those who come after us, in turn making the product more long-term sustainable and healthy, which ultimately benefits us again by increasing the likelihood the product continues to be maintained. (It’s also nice to give back.)
Re: my disrespect, I have taken a lot of disrespect and abuse from customers and in 99% of the cases, I later found that the disrespect was because they felt disrespected first. This probably feels familiar to you since it sounds like we have shared industry background:
When the customer opens an escalation ticket, and I end up having to spend a month managing that relationship while getting phone calls together so my senior leadership can hear the customer shout at me, I could rightfully call the customer disrespectful, and I could simultaneously operate by my business philosophy that the customer is indeed entitled to both the explicit and implied service for which they’ve paid. If the customer thinks we were being dishonest, well we were: we messed up by not proactively managing the breaking change with the customer, and then we totally blew off the customer’s initial ticket where they were nice to us, because we thought we could get away with it. It was very human on our part, and it’s also very human on the customer’s part to want to hit back.
But, a customer getting heard is not typical. From what I have seen, typically customers need the service more than the service provider needs each individual customer — this creates an imbalance where the provider can totally and arbitrarily F over a customer’s entire business, while only taking a 10-20% hit to their business despite their terrible customer service (although they risk losing in a decade to a competitor who can offer a better product with better customer service, but Wall Street and tech executives lack the cognitive ability to think in slices of time other than Year-over-Year). Obviously, treating your customers well is the winning strategy over the long run, but for-profit corporations lack the operational (and in the US, the legal fiduciary) ability to optimize for further out than end of next June.
You are right: I don’t want to be disrespectful or reactive in any case, and that’s my flaw to work on. I only wish to express that I was intentional in my disrespect. I have never and would never disrespect a customer. On the other hand, I see customers being disrespected all the time, everywhere in the industry and including here. I am trying to learn to pick my battles. Fr what it’s worth I have opened much nastier and much more frequent bugs on Microsoft and OpenAI because their profit and irresponsibility are magnitudes greater, so I should probably get those numbers up instead of equivocating HA (which as you said is relatively less commercial) with those contemptible beasts.