Sonos has some fantastic people

by Volker Weber

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It all started out with Spotify dropouts in a yet unreleased version of Sonos. I was unhappy with the way I was supposed to report the problem. Then the Head of Beta Program Management reached out to me. And she made a senior technical support engineer email me six days ago.

Badre analyzed my diagnostic, he suggested changes, looked again, he found (very old) problems that had existed for years. They were rooted in my strange mix of pre-release and release hardware with different region settings for wireless. A PLAYBAR could suggest a 5GHz channel that the satellites would be unable to use for instance.

Step by step my Sonos network got healthier, but there were still lingering problems. There were broadcasts on my network every ten minutes with 11 Mbps. So we tamed those with settings in my Linksys smart switch. I learned about Bridge Multicast Filtering, Unregistered Multicast Filtering, the correct STP settings, the lot. And finally, after rebuilding a router from scratch, the network is clean. Now I can go back to testing that yet unreleased version of the software.

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Badre would never give up. He would ride home and then check again. He was almost apologizing that he had to go to sleep. Badre is an exceptionally dedicated engineer. People like Badre make Sonos stand out from the rest.

Comments

Great story! And it shows: it's all about the people. Regardless of the business you are in.

Thomas Lang, 2016-12-13

Thomas, you are fully correct about that.
This does not only come down to each single engineer that works in a company but also directly applies to the managers - they also need to understand which of their engineers are important.

I guess Badre should be put up for a promotion at Sonos!

Johannes Koch, 2016-12-14

Is there some kind of howto or best practice document how to optimize networks for SONOS?

Christian Henseler, 2016-12-14

Knowledge paired with empathy, it's such a beautiful combination. Kudos to Mr. Mammar!

Frank Quednau , 2016-12-15

Christian, very simple actually: have a healthy network. We did not optimize anything on Sonos. We just made sure that the other defects in the network were resolved. Which has also benefitted everything else. In essence, Badre helped me resolve issues that were unrelated to his product.

Volker Weber, 2016-12-15

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