> There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer.
One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires.
In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.
I work at a (government and extreme bureaucratic) organisation that builds apps used by field engineers.
I found out SSO was broken. They had to login to every app using the same account. Twice per day because the token live was 4 hours "for security".
I found out it was because they published these apps as PWAs, making them more isolated than normal apps.
I asked the product manager and he says the issue is "with Apple and Google", not his department. When asked why he chose PWAs for the apps he said this was easier to deploy, saves them developer accounts and such.
Since I can't force him to change I found a workaround: SSO works in PWAs if you use Edge on a recent Android version on a Samsung tablet. Lucky me we had bought Samsung tablets (this was not a requirement when purchasing I looked it up, just luck).
I asked the Intune manager about this and they said the field engineers should just set Edge as default in stead of Chrome.
When trying this on a company tablet it said: "Edge disabled by X group policy". That guys' department set the policy...
After they removed this I asked why it wasn't the default browser and he said this wasn't possible. I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.
Later they said they had raised a support ticket with Microsoft for this.
On the internal Wiki I found a document describing the problem. It was dated 11 months before I joined.
I once worked in a government agency where 4 employees used a app that on ran on IE6. So the rest of the 2000 strong organization had to use chrome by remote desktop into a server.
Decision tree: Does any department still use IE6? Yes -> lets setup a Remote Desktop cluster so the rest can use Chrome
The short of it is: no one gives a shit about anything but their own paycheck and getting off of work at 5pm.
It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees)
The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.
I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
You border collied them? I’ve noticed a real turn towards aggressive disrespect in this community. It’s really gross and it doesn’t make you look smart. They’re humans have some respect and don’t be so toxic. You don’t have to dehumanize your coworkers. This is basic.
I see a fun metaphor for doing the tedious work of arranging a meeting, getting people to join, and getting a solution. Reading it put this way made my day a little brighter. I needed that, too.
Btw, border collies are awesome dogs, and sheep are also awesome. I find no automatic disrespect in using them as stand-ins for our human foibles; intent matters.
One of my first real experiences with Border Collies was at a family reunion. There were a bunch of kids running around playing in the park. At one point someone showed up with a border collie and I watched with delight and amazement as the dog did the herding thing and slowly and carefully pushed the group of children closer together. The kids didn't even realize it until they were way too close to each other to comfortably play tag. The owner called the dog back and the games continued.
Later on I ended up with a sheltie with a very strong herding instinct. She mostly just acted like the Fun Police though with the other dog and cats. Lovely creatures!
Herding sheep is such an interesting experience too. The best way I can describe it is that each sheep has a really large soap bubble around them. You need to push gently on the bubble to get them to go where you want them too. If you push too hard and the bubble pops, they'll scatter and you have to step back and let the bubble reform.
Not much a fan of metaphor? I personally appreciated the way they described about getting (corralling? shepherding? herding? Lots of common animal husbandry expressions in English) all the relevant humans together.
English is full of animal-based metaphors, and that's a pretty innocuous statement. "I herded everyone into a room" does not automatically imply that one perceives those people as animals.
I think the choice of breed has meaning. The border collie is the smartest breed of dog, and its origin is in herding sheep. Calling your coworkers sheep isn't particularly nice. Calling yourself the smartest breed of dog isn't particularly humble. That's why the person you're replying to objects.
Ridiculous. We should be calling people out for being performatively offended. It reduces the impact and gravitas of situations where real offense is given that should be considered.
I have herded cats, sorted sheep, and wrangled cattle all throughout my career. I can come up with more that are quite accurate to the situation.
And I've been the cat, sheep, and cattle likely more than I have been on the other side.
It's simply part of working with groups of humans. We become dumb in groups and lend ourselves towards herd behavior. It often requires someone tending to us to break us of the habit.
That's probably reading too much into the metaphor. I think it's apropos because regardless of whether the others are smart or not, we all have blind sides, and in order to get things done that need to be done you have to apply pressure in the right way to overcome a certain amount of group inertia. Those things still fit with the metaphor without necessarily being disrespectful.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the word picture that was used. I'd advise against assuming the worst possible interpretation of someone else's words (especially online). Most of us probably do that at least sometimes (present company included), but it would be much better to give people the benefit of the doubt. In this case, I think it is fair to assume that the original poster was just saying that he wouldn't let them try to get away and not actually deal with the problem -- much as a border collie prevents other animals from straying from the group, keeping them where they need to be.
There is no need to assume that they meant that the others in the meeting were less important or less intelligent, or whatever. They were, perhaps, just less interested in dealing with the problem.
Giving a shit is actively disincentivized in most companies because:
1. It stirs up trouble for other people, who will now hate you.
2. It demonstrates you're willing to go the extra mile. Like all productivity gains, this only works to your disadvantage - you will be given more work, and it will be more complex.
3. The systems in place are designed to be rigid, so when you give a shit you will probably fail, which reflects poorly on you. Setting low expectations and meeting them is usually better than setting high expectations and falling short.
And on the topic of number 2, this is why I cannot get behind agentic coding in software engineering. I don't think people understand that those productivity gains can only ever make their life worse. Right now, that might not be the case. But as it becomes the standard, the expectations of velocity will meet it. You will have less teammates, harder work, and less time to get it done.
We've reached a point where a large segment of the software engineering workforce has been smelling their farts for so long that they're legitimately advocating for changes that will make their life worse.
> I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
I run a business and the passion is still hard to maintain. On Friday one of my customers cussed me out for 20 mins because I took a few hours to respond. That was a tough way to start the weekend.
It’s a problem of motivation. Now, if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime. So where's
the motivation? And here's another thing, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now!
I’m so tired of the “nothing ever happens” crowd. Y’all are absolutely exhausting and add nothing positive to the conversation. Assuming everyone on the internet is lying makes as little sense as assuming nobody on the internet is lying.
Edit: I guess I misunderstood the parent (look in the replies). I hate the phenomenon I’m describing so I’ll leave the comment but I don’t want to besmirch caminante’s good name!
life is too short to spend it drowning in misinformation. Calling someone out on a technical failure is 100% legit. How is it "aggressive" if they're clearly wrong?
I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point, especially when the C-suite is full of founders (or maybe that’s worse?). I can understand how people want to make their bosses happy, and that can cascade into constant bullshitting, but at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?”
The U.S. Nuclear Navy, for all of its many flaws, gets this right. Generally at least once a year, the head of Naval Reactors - a four-star Admiral - tours every vessel, which may include a brief underway period. During this tour, the Admiral will talk to the engine room watchstanders, with all senior leadership removed. They’ll ask how daily life is, what they find challenging or annoying, what they like, etc. There’s obviously a lot of self-filtering (though sometimes not - Navy Nukes are not known for their social graces) that occurs, and also what a junior watchstander finds annoying may just be a required part of the job, but some useful signal is gathered.
Even outside of the nuclear program, one standout example was Admiral Zumwalt, who as Chief of Naval Operations implemented 70 different changes over his tenure as a direct result of talking to sailors, all of which were designed to improve quality of life, efficiency, or communication.
The truth is you can't get anyone to do what you want. You can try to make them do what you want but they're someone else in the end. Sir Walter Raleigh's beloved friend and lieutenant was Lawrence Kemys. When Raleigh was pardoned and sent back to find El Dorado, the conditions set were that he should not attack the Spaniards. He goes out to South America, and puts a detachment ashore led by his close friend and confidant - as aligned a person as you can imagine. Kemys attacks a Spanish outpost against express orders, gets Raleigh's son killed, returns to Raleigh to inform him of this, and promptly commits suicide. None of this is going to help Raleigh, though, because the conditions of his pardon now having been violated he is executed as promised.
> at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?”
Why would you when all of the reports you're getting from your managers are 5/5 stars and "everything's great". Once an organization gets large enough, the information that reaches C-suite has been filtered through so many layers that it barely resembles reality anymore, even when you remove malice from the equation.
its extremely hard if you're being lied to when your org is so vast that trusting delegated responsible individuals is the realistic way of managing it. Also its probably not going to factor into your bonus.
At my org the CIO knows fuck all about computers. Great guy on a personal level but wouldn't be able to quit Vim even if the lives of his 3 kids depended on it.
He was put there because he was with the company for years before and he led other departments fine.
Since he can't evaluate anything IT related himself he relies on 'advice' from the people beneath him who try to get the most budget for their departments by overstating how important they are.
This layer beneath him is mostly product managers, RTEs etc... (We are SAFE Agile! Developer Velocity, Woohoo!).
They also don't know much about computer and if they do it's very domain specific, such as SAP or so.
These people try to fight for budget by overstating their importance. They demonstrate this by having more apps and more people relying on them.
"Look we handled 2000 support tickets, the company would grind to a halt without us!".
Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.
This keeps going on and on. I have 10 years experience as engineer and wanted to see "the other side" but it's so exhausting.
A few months back a 'privacy officer' asked why the first and last names of our employees were in the Active Directory and ordered them to reduce the privacy risks.
They failed to specify what risks. Couldn't articulate them even when asked. They also didn't say when the risk would've been reduced 'enough'.
The team was panicking as they were now 'non-compliant' with company policy.
I had to intervene personally to make sure this single directive didn't derail our entire company.
> Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.
I’m constantly having to fight people to not add new, inactionable alerts as knee-jerk reactions to incidents. I swear the thought process is “an incident happened, we added a new alert - look, we’re proactive!” instead of, you know, fixing the root causes.
When WeTransfer suddenty changed it's policy for AI training last summer the entire CISO department panicked and had the entire website blocked.
In traffic we could see that 12% of the company used the site daily, transferring gigabytes of data between our engineers and contractors.
I asked why we didn't just start paying WeTransfer since it's so widely used and this would solve the problem, too.
They said they should just use the internal SharePoint file sharing tool.
I asked how this would work since most of WeTransfer use was us receiving docs, not sharing them.
They said the contractors should just update their policy, and that was the end of the debate.
Last time I spoke to a field engineer he said they mostly use private mailboxes now mostly since they "can't even copy something in Outlook anymore" on company laptops.
I decided not to report this to CISO and these docs are workorders and pictures demonstrating workorders have been completed. They're irrelevant one day later.
would you listen to a doctor that could not suture a cut?
how about a mechanic that could not remove a socket from a ratchet?
simple file editing. vi has been around for every. if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?
(personal anecdote: once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..)
I’d been developing with emacs for years before I learned how to quit vi. Just means he’s never had to change the config on a remote server with a barebones setup :-)
It's more of a cheap gotcha than a valid test. If we take somebody like me, I learned to code in IDEA/PyCharm, these days mostly code with either Zed or OpenCode, and occasionally drop into nano and Positron. I wouldn't be able to do anything in Neovim without looking it up simply because I had no reason to learn it. A doctor who learned practices appropriate in the 20th century might now necessarily be hired for knowledge of these practices today.
no, its pop quiz bullshit. Oh you know about ":wq"? Well done! But if you don't know, you do it a few times and now you know. It does nothing, outside of teaching you a bit about poor UX.
> if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?
using one of the other available ides?
> once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..
That's not a sign of good judgement, that's a sign of being technically fashionable. It's hipster shit, akin to rejecting a candidate because they're a fan of Taylor Swift and don't know who the band Tool are.
What distinguishes knowing about vim from knowing about virtually anything else? If you apply to a job in tech, you should know that by long-pressing the power button, your PC turns off. Is this pop quiz shit, too? The bar is ridiculously low these days, apparently.
Funny/informative story about this: There was a project, OpenHatch.org c. 2011 that tried to get people to be comfortable enough with programming to contribute to open source projects. In one of the tutorials (I think introducing command-line git?), if you followed the instructions, it would dump you into vim. It hadn't introduced to you vim by that point or explained that's what was happening, so you wouldn't even know enough to google the error. And this was a project that was supposed to be primarily focused on being newbie-friendly!
> I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point
The people who start a company care deeply about the problem they're trying to solve.
The first N employees also care - they're willing to risk working for start-up because they can see the potential and want to help.
But then you hire, say, an accountant. The accountant doesn't care about your mission. You are just another client to them. You need someone to staff the phone or sweep the floors or design the logo or whatever. Why should they care? You're not paying them to care, they're not invested in the company nor its success, and they believe nothing they do for the company will change their personal fortunes.
Then, before you know it, you have a couple of floors filled with people who have no incentive to care.
It is incredibly difficult to run an organisation where everyone is mission driven.
About 10 years ago now, when what would eventually become Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had just done an internal launch of the first availability domain, as we got ourselves read for public launch late in the year, several senior staff and engineers had to go do a presentation and demonstration of the product to Larry Ellison.
They did trial run after trial run, made sure trying to make sure there were no bugs in the demonstration path. They nailed it, presentation went smoothly, live demonstration just worked. Provisioned a bare metal instance, had it running hosting something within minutes of launch. Larry was suitably impressed, but the thing that most impressed him was that he'd been presented with an end-to-end live demonstration. It had never occurred to any of the folks involved to do it any other way, but apparently all too often, all he ever saw was slide shows from product teams, particularly when things were several months away from public launch.
I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".
> I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".
I used to work a very small org with an 80+ year old CEO. I feel like half the time the slide decks were unchanged and very little was getting done but I'm not sure the CEO noticed. Given the CEO often sidelined those meetings themselves, by having some bizarre senior moments. So what should be a 30m meeting always became a 2hr+ long one. The guy used to be technical but as you describe it had slipped away from him a long time ago and he had failed to delegate effectively.
Those meetings felt like my real job was just theatre for the boss in some sort of quasi-nursing home stage, where we helped them maintain the illusion they were running an entirely functioning business. I half wonder if in my short time there, I was a mug for actually doing any work.
The later part of that quoted passage ends with a possibly rhetorical question.
> ... When was the last time the CEO of the above company called their own customer support line?
So Bezos definitely hasn't done that in a long time. Definitely not in India. So I would say the answer ought to be: a CEO does that or has to do that only until the company becomes too big or has captured a sufficiently entrenched large slice of the market.
At one meeting to build out a new service as a next generation to a flagship AWS service that I worked on, I got to meet all the product leaders and managers.
At that meeting, I realized most of them had never used the product and see their claim to leadership role due to their the ability to manage up and down.
I use the product on my personal projects and I hated it with a passion.
In my last role (engineering side) the VP of Product objected to me using the phrase "eating your own dogfood" because it was "gross" and she always interjected and replaced it with "drink your own champagne". I countered (privately) that was a feature; it's supposed to be a little unappetizing because you're early, building empathy and getting a different perspective (to a dog, dog food is delicious!). I think the difference in perspective succinctly illustrates the schism between trying to understand the customer experience asap, and the data-driven, kpi crowd where - conveniently - you can't discover these issues until it's too late.
I think the origin is in the phrase, "Will the dogs eat the dog food?" which was common VC-speak in the 90's and 00's, referencing dog food commercials that once ran on TV, and meaning something like "this has been made to sound great in an internal powerpoint presentation, but will customers actually like it?"
In 2015, Marc Andreessen memorably said of Mixpanel's success at product-led growth: "The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasn’t done any marketing yet."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-adva...
That then led to the idea of "eating your own dog food", because if even you won't eat it, what credibility do you have saying that the other dogs will?
I can't even remember when I first heard this expression in CS. It feels like it was already an idiom when I was in university in the early 90s. It also felt like it was tapping into a general cultural background I already had growing up in California. It did not require any explanation.
Without being able to cite a specific TV ad or other urban legend sort of baseline, it clearly communicated that you hold yourself and your products to a higher standard. As a dog-food producer, you don't just meet the minimum requirements for legal sales, but you make it well enough to be fit for human consumption too.
It's in the same category as someone demonstrating that they could safely drink or breathe byproducts of some other industrial process. And, ironically, there was also a widely understood corollary that we could expect PR types to do something like this while secretly fearing that it would actually harm them.
Yeah, I've never really been at all offended by the "eating your own dogfood" phrase, because I always saw that as being the point also.
I must admit, however, that the title of this article was too crass for me. I came very close to not reading it at all just because of the title. In my opinion, the article would be better served by something else, but I'm just not a big fan of bathroom humor in general.
Interesting perspective. I watch a YouTube channel of a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog, and even feeds his dog from the skillet where he cooked the meal. Many practical reasons for that but also the dog being the main tool in hunting and getting that food in the first place.
From my understanding, it's generally for health purposes (though the convenience doesn't hurt). An example my vet provided is that the level of sodium consumption needed by humans is way too high for dogs.
There's an economic benefit: in the UK (and many other countries), ingredients which are not "fit for human consumption" (and might otherwise be thrown away) can be processed into pet food.
Much commercial dog-food is made with ingredients which aren't fit to be consumed by humans.
There was a BBC early-morning breakfast tv slot in which a dog was presented as 'vegetarian', until test time...the dog (given free choice between two bowls of food placed on the studio floor) went immmediiately for the meat dish.
I've heard exactly the same response before and I shared your reaction.
The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?
Interesting. I prefer "champagne" as it clarifies the goal: to make something curated, crafted, and desired. I've never interpreted the dogfood v. champagne difference as anti-empathy somehow.
> the goal: to make something curated, crafted, and desired.
None of these are the goal.
The goal is to deliver value. The saying just means to sample your own product, with the implication being that you should be doing some form of quality management. It could just as easily be “play with your own widgets”.
Bougie-fying it to champagne destroys much of the meaning because it literally doesn’t matter what the product is, you should be sampling it no matter how distasteful or irrelevant to your personal interests. You would not have a hard time getting people to sample champagne for their job.
The point is that you're testing something for which you aren't the target user. Champagne is a bad example because champagne manufacturers most certainly themselves imbibe in their own product, in fact they're probably connoisseurs. It's a very different development process to make a product for which you aren't a target customer.
I was trying to articulate to myself why calling it champagne feels like self-deception. And the reason is that to a SE all software is broken, buggy, slow, incomplete, has the wrong feature set, and is not extensible. To us software gets shipped when it stops giving us cold sweats.
For a PM to assume that the product ever becomes champagne feels very naive.
I think it's sort of the opposite. You're saying that your dog food is of such high quality that even the CEO will eat a can of it. You're saying you hold your product in high esteem, not that you have low self esteem.
> getting a different perspective (to a dog, dog food is delicious!)
Didn't you just destroy your own argument? If dog food is expected to be more delicious to dogs than humans, how is eating it supposed to indicate anything about whether it's well-made for the dog? Shouldn't you have your dog eat it, rather than yourself?
So isn't your manager's alternative the one that actually makes sense?
Interesting, I wouldn’t think it matters that much though. If the phrase eating dogfood is unappetising to some when why not use the champagne analogy.
This is a great substitution, and more accurate since humans and dogs have different preferences in food, so humans eating real dogfood is often avoided in practice.
But it's harder to to turn "drink your own champagne" into a gerund like "dogfooding".
Reading this story and related comments, I'm struck folks have lost the history around dogfooding. From what I understand the term really picked up from Paul Maritz.
The saying was - "if you're not eating your own dogfood, you're smoking your own dope."
Very basic idea: is your product good enough that you would use it / consume it for your own needs and purposes? No? Then you are deluding yourself if you think you have a good product.
What do you mean? Champagne is classy, it matches perfectly the role of VP. These are special, unique people. They will take your unrefined words and use their magic to make it stand out.
I’m the kind of person that just assumes customer service is going to be bad. I gird myself whenever I have to call a company and just deal with their gauntlet with patience, knowing the trick is to outlast them. It costs them money every time you call. I’ll often tell them I know that and assure them I will continue calling until the matter is resolved. It’s not fun, it’s just the way things sadly are.
My old man, however, still feels some kind of righteous indignation when he spends his hard earned money and doesn’t feel he’s getting what he paid for. He loves to give a piece of his mind to the companies that mistreat him, and he always says “And I hope my comments are being recorded for quality assurance!”
The new feature of the iPhone where you can put a phone tree on hold until a person answers is very nice. I had a kerfuffle with Delta airlines along with a few thousand other people some days ago. I had to hold for 2.5 hours, but I spent it catching up with my dad and then my phone rang when the CSA was ready for me. I was so fresh and bright on the call I got an upgrade pretty much just for not being a bitch.
I get it. I also know customer service is a pretty low paying job for something that involves being yelled at all day
I get as frustrated as anyone, but it’s not the fault of the person whose job it is to take my call.
I remember once on the phone with Comcast I just explained the situation and jokingly said look, if it helps, feel free to tell ‘em I’m yelling and screaming. The guy laughed. An engineer called me an hour later with a firmware update for my modem.
Sometimes there’s no winning. But sometimes it helps if you can put people on your team
Yep. When I’m frustrated on the phone with a rep, I always make sure to say something like “I understand this isn’t your fault, but I’m very frustrated with X.”
Angry customers aren't at fault. If all customers are mad as hell when they call, then the company will have to start paying better wages to keep customer support staff from quitting, and they'd rather fix the problem before doing that.
"Eat your own dog-food and smell your own farts" is just crass enough that people will actually remember and retell it. Nice work by the author's Comparative Memetics Division.
"Eat your own dog food" == experience your own product.
"Smell your own farts" == experience your entire product, including things that are typically unmentionables like customer service and billing
The phrase is striking but doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Companies make dogfood and sell it and expect others (dogs, who aren't known for verbalizing dissatisfaction with their food) to consume it. The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is.
But I can't imaging a business which involves collecting farts and selling them to others and where sniffing a small quantity of each bottled fart would help improve production processes to ensure a better experience for the customer. And most people are appalled at the smell of others' farts but can tolerate their own, so the "smell your own" test wouldn't really tell you anything.
>The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is.
Bingo. This is why "eat your own dog food" works so well. The best koans and parables include a contradiction, which is a teaching tool not a logic bug.
You may think you don't need to eat your own dog food (just like the dog food companies), but actually you should still do it.
I am surprised there are so many people on HN that completely miss the point. I am actually shocked. I am not shocked, however, that there are people who get offended. Getting offended is so 202x.
Yeah, my mental image before reading the article was the farts analogy would be a company actually trying out the AI chatbot slopware they added to their line of Bluetooth toothbrushes and hyping to investors as the Next Big Thing or something like that.
The thing about dogfooding is that you have to force it in many domains, and if you aren't careful it can push you towards solving issues your users don't actually have.
We've found ourselves trying to find this balance on Tritium. It's a word processor for lawyers, so has a specific narrow domain that allows us to provide a differentiated experience from Word. But if we try to use it like Word, we end up wanting generalized features that don't fit that strategy. I wrote a little about what we've come up with here: https://tritium.legal/blog/eat.
This is one of the compelling rationales for closed-source / commercial software in certain B2B SAAS domains. It seems like you just cannot adequately test the happy and sad paths from a QA perspective in FOSS unless it's (1) insanely successful or (2) a dev tool.
This describes quite well the huge advantage small companies have vs big companies.
(Motivated) people at small companies "care", and what I mean with that is they are responsible and can see a large enough portion of the customer experience that - if something is broken - they'll see the pain and try to address it.
At a big company no one cares. They of course care about their job, but their job is such a small fraction of the overall customer experience, that seeing their work having an impact on their customer is exceptionally difficult.
That's why large companies need to encode customer feedback into a system to imitate feedback cycles. Mostly in metrics.
That's a very lossy way to capture signal, and leaves a lot to be desired, but so far it doesnt seem like anyone has come up with a better system.
> That's why large companies need to encode customer feedback into a system to imitate feedback cycles. Mostly in metrics. That's a very lossy way to capture signal, and leaves a lot to be desired, but so far it doesnt seem like anyone has come up with a better system.
The other thing you can do is having senior leadership occasionally try the product themselves and talk directly to customers (especially ones that have problems).
Often, problems remain because of bureaucratic hurdles, or disputes between different fiefdoms: there's a feature that needs teams X and Y to improve, but it would only help the internal metrics for team X, so team Y doesn't give a shit and drags their feet. Leaders who are sufficiently high in the hierarchy can cut through these sorts of problems if they know and care.
I manage post sales support at a small company where this theme is present, however, I'm concerned that things may be slipping in the wrong direction. I need help dealing with this situation.
Our software engineering team is burdened with tech debt and aggressive product roadmap. Understandably, they often feel the need to push back and keep things under control. Our customers and the employees who are accountable to our customers literally lose sleep when things aren't going well. Our engineering team feels complacent to function on a 9-5 schedule and sleep on critical issues for weeks.
The only thing the engineering team appears motivated to actually own is the next iteration of the escalation process that somehow makes them even less accountable. Invariably the next iteration includes adding more details to Jira tickets that nobody will read.
Basically no one on that team is dogfooding the product. Broken features are being shipped and they are expecting us to actually sell and support this.
I agree with the broader point, but I'm perplexed that the author is talking about dogfooding as a "sacred practice in the tech industry" in the context of customer support. Among big tech companies, customer support usually isn't seen a part of the product. If you work at Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, you don't try to go through the non-existent consumer support channels to resolve issues with your account.
Interestingly, in the company I currently work for, if an employee encounters a problem with the product, the expected way to report the issue is to open a ticket. Not in an different system with different people responsible for handling it, in the same ticketing system that customers use.
To me, "dogfooding" isn't using your own product out of loyalty or some nondescript principle, as the author suggests. It's specifically about using your own product during its development as a means of testing while it's in its worst phase - literally eating dog food for a while.
It's the same horse manure, when architectonauts and developers aren't responsible for the operation of their Goldberg-inventions.
Another phrase that comes to mind is: no skin in the game.
To me "unaccountability" -- or whatever naming fits better -- needs its own circle of hell.
1) I call to cancel an insurance policy on a car I sold. I'm greeted by the IVR, press three to cancel a policy, we're off to a good start. Next follows a long speech about how I need to call a special number if I stuck in the middle east and need to get back home, general precautions I need to take and my rules and rights. All great information, except I've already indicated that I call to cancel a policy. The chance that I'm sitting in an airport in Bahrain, desperately trying to get home, yet I decide that now is a good time to go through and cancel unneeded insurance policies is absolutely zero. You already know why I'm calling, tailor the message to that.
2) Internet is out, for the second week. Customer service dude is typing in stuff, looking stuff up, trying to figure out why the case has been closed. "While we wait let me talk to you about our streaming bundles"... Dude, I know the boss is making you do this, but don't try to upsell a streaming bundle to a customer you can't even get online.
The doctors office is the worst though. Their entire system for guiding you through when to call and where to call take minutes for them to explain. The call it routed to the same people regardless. There are so many confusing and irrelevant messages from the system and in the end you are still routed to the same set of people.
Most of my calls to customer services is because selfservice online absolutely suck and can't do simple things. Every industry could save a fortune in callcenter costs if their websites was ever so slightly better. Often it's not even about being able to selfservice, it can just be providing the tiniest bit of actual information. Your call volume is larger than normal for the past five years, because your stupid website is getting worse every year.
The worst one I've had is that after waiting for about 10 minutes, it passed through to a person who pushed me through the another department, only to end up in the same preselect menu I started the call with but with another option selected which points me to a website where you must enter your question and get an email back with the request to call the service desk and select the option I took in the first place. The circle of help desk life. Kafka would be proud.
This is likely due to them merging two help desks into one making the second part useless as they can no longer see the data they need and thus canceling it entirely since it didn't get the right metrics.
Also turns out that calling the competitors help desk is more useful as they can actually see the thing I was interested in as it is shared between them (fiber connections work schedule when they start to dig, hint they weren't going to). Can't use the competitor since the connections are monopolies...
Here we have an open connect system on fiber in large parts of the country. The ISP lease the fiber each other, power companies or dedicated fiber providers. That means that you can in many areas use the competitors status page to get some idea as to why your connection may be down. The larger ISP do not like being told that you can see that there is an outage in your area, while their own monitoring is all green.
I just assume a lot of product managers have never used their products anymore, and it shows across the industry.
Have you ever tried to play Xbox live after not being signed in for a long time?
Have you ever tried to use smart search terms in the Amazon search box?
Have you ever tried to use these tv channel apps on a Roku?
Do Fridgeaire reps own their own appliances?
I’m just convinced people don’t use their own products where the people that use them and care are so few and far in between things are only getting enshrined.
I know a person. Ex-Googly. Doing his startup. Spent one year on a crazy complex product. Investors do not get it. Users do not get it. He spends 99% of the time explaining why his ideas are so good. You ask to try the product, weeks pass and just slides and video demos. When you eventually try it, it's so confusing and nothing really works. I tried to make him understand that the constraint he needs to fit is users being able to understand rapidly why it's useful to them and that it should work. He does not care. He says it's about the story, and that the story will drive millions unlocking a super big team building his idea. I said that's cool but why in the meantime you don't just go with one thing that is useful and works and then procedurally evolve to your vision while you interact with the user and discover more about their problems. The answer was a one-hour speech on Google leveling system. Maybe he is right. Time will tell.
Some years back I was introduced to UK service consultancy Vanguard (and their "Vanguard Method"), essentially a systems thinking approach to improving service (not to be confused with the enormous US investment management company).
In their world, "smelling your own farts" (ie. listening to and, more importantly, understanding what matters to your customers using normative learning methods) isn't primarily about empathy, it's about getting knowledge so you can understand how to intervene in your company as a system.
Put that way, it's not a waste for decision-makers to listen to customer phonecalls, it's in fact the only way for them to gain the knowledge they need to understand what to do to improve their service (assuming that's their goal).
And lying: "Please listen carefully as our menu items have changed". Only once did I get what everyone should use instead: "Please listen carefully to be sure you make the right selection". (Lying is also normalized by "I have read and agree to ....". Maybe better would be: "By clicking this box, you are agreeing to our needlessly lengthy terms, whether or not you have read them."
With a mass product we're all at the mercy of the bottom quantile or even vigintile. These are the people who need to hear about checking website, collecting basic information, etc.
Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service.
Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc.
There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's direct phone number.
Ah, so the minutes long wait hearing answering machine bs is a universal experience. I thought it was a local thing and limited to ISPs, utilities, and financials... When I can choose between competing companies, having a direct line to a human for customer support is at the top of my list. I'm happy with either chat or phone, I just don't want to go through a bot first.
Whenever I have to call an IVR system for support it puts me in a blood rage 98 out of 100 times. This space is the ultimate dark pattern mine field.
My common interactions were with banks and telco companies. Absolute trash.
I'm pretty sure some systems allowed remembering the DTMF menu and press it while the voice recording played. But the recent systems I called did not allow this. It was like they intentionally made people wait to suffer the torture.
People call these systems as a last resort (At least I do). It should be illegal to make them so bad.
Also, I used to work with Telco side guys of these systems and they were very proud of these "capabilities".
Customer service has different meanings. Personally I prefer
good, simple and effective documentation. I hate having to use
a phone to explain problems. It's ok to do it in person, but
not my preferred way.
> It's all very well to experience your own product when it is working, but when was the last time anyone in the above organisation went through a "difficult" customer journey.
I kind of prefer companies that build products that never ever
need anything. Not even warranty calls, because the thing just
keeps on working.
What I noticed in the last few years was that we are too dependent
on google search. Now that it sucks, finding high quality information
has become harder - and AI trend is further ruining this, as everyone
just has the AI summarize stuff now, which does not always work either.
The age old problem. Customer service isn't supposed to be mind numbingly unfathomable, and responding to customers should be easy. Unfortunately, unless higher management engages (is that Bezos or Gates? I've heard both) things will get lost in the mix.
Dogfooding was a virtuous cycle for user and service provider alike, because incentives were aligned.
Then growth - excuse me, metastasis - came along.
Thanks to metastasis - excuse me, enshittification - we've outgrown dogfooding. We'd used it as a kind of UX gyroscope, something that works to keep us balanced without too much institutional thought or effort. It made us more efficient at competing. Now that the biggest firms are the least threatened by competition, why would they subject themselves to the indignities of the User?
The author should consider smelling his own perfume, given the state and design of the site where he delivers his musings and gives us the moral lecture on not making the lives of one's customers miserable (without a hint of irony).
> There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer.
One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires.
In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.
I work at a (government and extreme bureaucratic) organisation that builds apps used by field engineers.
I found out SSO was broken. They had to login to every app using the same account. Twice per day because the token live was 4 hours "for security".
I found out it was because they published these apps as PWAs, making them more isolated than normal apps.
I asked the product manager and he says the issue is "with Apple and Google", not his department. When asked why he chose PWAs for the apps he said this was easier to deploy, saves them developer accounts and such.
Since I can't force him to change I found a workaround: SSO works in PWAs if you use Edge on a recent Android version on a Samsung tablet. Lucky me we had bought Samsung tablets (this was not a requirement when purchasing I looked it up, just luck).
I asked the Intune manager about this and they said the field engineers should just set Edge as default in stead of Chrome.
When trying this on a company tablet it said: "Edge disabled by X group policy". That guys' department set the policy...
After they removed this I asked why it wasn't the default browser and he said this wasn't possible. I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.
Later they said they had raised a support ticket with Microsoft for this.
On the internal Wiki I found a document describing the problem. It was dated 11 months before I joined.
I once worked in a government agency where 4 employees used a app that on ran on IE6. So the rest of the 2000 strong organization had to use chrome by remote desktop into a server.
Decision tree: Does any department still use IE6? Yes -> lets setup a Remote Desktop cluster so the rest can use Chrome
The short of it is: no one gives a shit about anything but their own paycheck and getting off of work at 5pm.
It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees)
The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.
I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
I do!
I border collied these people into a room and the issue is now fixed.
The system still sucks but 2000 field engineers got 10 min of their days back.
A few weeks later the Scrum Master of the PWA team gave an inspiring talk about it at a conference.
Personally you couldn't torture out of me that my app was so bad for so long, but yeah.
Interesting...I happen to have a border collie and their ability to get things done their way simply by looking at humans is...uncanny.
I will have to think of things like this where can save 5-10 min on something program-wide.
You border collied them? I’ve noticed a real turn towards aggressive disrespect in this community. It’s really gross and it doesn’t make you look smart. They’re humans have some respect and don’t be so toxic. You don’t have to dehumanize your coworkers. This is basic.
I see a fun metaphor for doing the tedious work of arranging a meeting, getting people to join, and getting a solution. Reading it put this way made my day a little brighter. I needed that, too.
Btw, border collies are awesome dogs, and sheep are also awesome. I find no automatic disrespect in using them as stand-ins for our human foibles; intent matters.
GP, please don't be discouraged.
One of my first real experiences with Border Collies was at a family reunion. There were a bunch of kids running around playing in the park. At one point someone showed up with a border collie and I watched with delight and amazement as the dog did the herding thing and slowly and carefully pushed the group of children closer together. The kids didn't even realize it until they were way too close to each other to comfortably play tag. The owner called the dog back and the games continued.
Later on I ended up with a sheltie with a very strong herding instinct. She mostly just acted like the Fun Police though with the other dog and cats. Lovely creatures!
Herding sheep is such an interesting experience too. The best way I can describe it is that each sheep has a really large soap bubble around them. You need to push gently on the bubble to get them to go where you want them too. If you push too hard and the bubble pops, they'll scatter and you have to step back and let the bubble reform.
Imagine the pearl clutching if he’d used the “herding cats” metaphor.
Not much a fan of metaphor? I personally appreciated the way they described about getting (corralling? shepherding? herding? Lots of common animal husbandry expressions in English) all the relevant humans together.
English is full of animal-based metaphors, and that's a pretty innocuous statement. "I herded everyone into a room" does not automatically imply that one perceives those people as animals.
in this analogy, it is OP who is the dog.
I think the choice of breed has meaning. The border collie is the smartest breed of dog, and its origin is in herding sheep. Calling your coworkers sheep isn't particularly nice. Calling yourself the smartest breed of dog isn't particularly humble. That's why the person you're replying to objects.
Ridiculous. We should be calling people out for being performatively offended. It reduces the impact and gravitas of situations where real offense is given that should be considered.
I have herded cats, sorted sheep, and wrangled cattle all throughout my career. I can come up with more that are quite accurate to the situation.
And I've been the cat, sheep, and cattle likely more than I have been on the other side.
It's simply part of working with groups of humans. We become dumb in groups and lend ourselves towards herd behavior. It often requires someone tending to us to break us of the habit.
This is some really tortured logic to find something to get offended about.
> Calling yourself the smartest breed of dog isn't particularly humble
Surely “smart as a border collie” is not a high bar for a human.
That's probably reading too much into the metaphor. I think it's apropos because regardless of whether the others are smart or not, we all have blind sides, and in order to get things done that need to be done you have to apply pressure in the right way to overcome a certain amount of group inertia. Those things still fit with the metaphor without necessarily being disrespectful.
I have a relative that has a border collie and the thing has got to have the dog version of Down syndrome.
This dog does the worst job of being a dog that I’ve ever seen.
They should stop acting so much like sheep then.
they did not call their coworkers sheep, though.
a border collie can nip the heels of humans just as well.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the word picture that was used. I'd advise against assuming the worst possible interpretation of someone else's words (especially online). Most of us probably do that at least sometimes (present company included), but it would be much better to give people the benefit of the doubt. In this case, I think it is fair to assume that the original poster was just saying that he wouldn't let them try to get away and not actually deal with the problem -- much as a border collie prevents other animals from straying from the group, keeping them where they need to be.
There is no need to assume that they meant that the others in the meeting were less important or less intelligent, or whatever. They were, perhaps, just less interested in dealing with the problem.
'corralled' better for you?
And yeah I did that. It wasn't even my app. Or my team. Or my field engineers.
I was just fucking ashamed of our entire IT department and thus took it upon me to fix this.
It was the first time the PM had ever spoken to a field engineer, I think.
I guess we’ve worked at different places.
Giving a shit is actively disincentivized in most companies because:
1. It stirs up trouble for other people, who will now hate you.
2. It demonstrates you're willing to go the extra mile. Like all productivity gains, this only works to your disadvantage - you will be given more work, and it will be more complex.
3. The systems in place are designed to be rigid, so when you give a shit you will probably fail, which reflects poorly on you. Setting low expectations and meeting them is usually better than setting high expectations and falling short.
And on the topic of number 2, this is why I cannot get behind agentic coding in software engineering. I don't think people understand that those productivity gains can only ever make their life worse. Right now, that might not be the case. But as it becomes the standard, the expectations of velocity will meet it. You will have less teammates, harder work, and less time to get it done.
We've reached a point where a large segment of the software engineering workforce has been smelling their farts for so long that they're legitimately advocating for changes that will make their life worse.
> I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
I run a business and the passion is still hard to maintain. On Friday one of my customers cussed me out for 20 mins because I took a few hours to respond. That was a tough way to start the weekend.
It’s a problem of motivation. Now, if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime. So where's the motivation? And here's another thing, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now!
Believe it or not, there exist places where 50% or more give a shit.
I'm sure at Apple under Jobs, the % would've been very high. It will have dropped significantly by now.
You're absolutely right on a country-scale though.
It gets worse. In my company the least competent people care the most.
This is like a perfect case study in how problems don't get solved, they just get… routed
Liars gonna lie.
> I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.
I've found that LLMs really democratize debate when issues like this arise!
Can't guarantee you'll win, but when someone bets you're not willing to RTFM to call their bluff-- Oh boy!
It's funny that you're replying with a recommendation to use LLMs when the parent comment is about how a search engine worked just fine.
If I google a question like that these days I'm likely to get an LLM response as the first result. The line is definitely blurred
The irony isn't lost on me, either.
Googling does result with a Gemini/AI response at the top.
that's why you set &udm=14 in the search URL config...
I’m so tired of the “nothing ever happens” crowd. Y’all are absolutely exhausting and add nothing positive to the conversation. Assuming everyone on the internet is lying makes as little sense as assuming nobody on the internet is lying.
Edit: I guess I misunderstood the parent (look in the replies). I hate the phenomenon I’m describing so I’ll leave the comment but I don’t want to besmirch caminante’s good name!
Are you replying to the intended comment?
The parent said they were getting stonewalled by a colleague over a T/F. Maybe you're assuming I called the parent a liar...?
Yeah. I think your comment is being misunderstood.
I blame me ;-). Though, one haywire reply can taint everyone's interpretation!
Thanks for the heads up! I’ve edited my comment to absolve you of any crime. :-P
Not offended. Try to have a 'better' day.
This is an odd level of aggression. Life is too short.
What do you propose instead?
edit: Nevermind. You shared your thoughts in a later comment above, dismissing the HN forum as vindictive.
life is too short to spend it drowning in misinformation. Calling someone out on a technical failure is 100% legit. How is it "aggressive" if they're clearly wrong?
Life is too short for liars.
I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point, especially when the C-suite is full of founders (or maybe that’s worse?). I can understand how people want to make their bosses happy, and that can cascade into constant bullshitting, but at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?”
The U.S. Nuclear Navy, for all of its many flaws, gets this right. Generally at least once a year, the head of Naval Reactors - a four-star Admiral - tours every vessel, which may include a brief underway period. During this tour, the Admiral will talk to the engine room watchstanders, with all senior leadership removed. They’ll ask how daily life is, what they find challenging or annoying, what they like, etc. There’s obviously a lot of self-filtering (though sometimes not - Navy Nukes are not known for their social graces) that occurs, and also what a junior watchstander finds annoying may just be a required part of the job, but some useful signal is gathered.
Even outside of the nuclear program, one standout example was Admiral Zumwalt, who as Chief of Naval Operations implemented 70 different changes over his tenure as a direct result of talking to sailors, all of which were designed to improve quality of life, efficiency, or communication.
The truth is you can't get anyone to do what you want. You can try to make them do what you want but they're someone else in the end. Sir Walter Raleigh's beloved friend and lieutenant was Lawrence Kemys. When Raleigh was pardoned and sent back to find El Dorado, the conditions set were that he should not attack the Spaniards. He goes out to South America, and puts a detachment ashore led by his close friend and confidant - as aligned a person as you can imagine. Kemys attacks a Spanish outpost against express orders, gets Raleigh's son killed, returns to Raleigh to inform him of this, and promptly commits suicide. None of this is going to help Raleigh, though, because the conditions of his pardon now having been violated he is executed as promised.
> at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?”
Why would you when all of the reports you're getting from your managers are 5/5 stars and "everything's great". Once an organization gets large enough, the information that reaches C-suite has been filtered through so many layers that it barely resembles reality anymore, even when you remove malice from the equation.
Because if you’re in charge of an org, you should occasionally validate what you’re being told? Is this an uncommon belief or something?
Surprisingly, it is. If you find a problem then the value of your shares drops.
Still, better than letting the problem find you.
its extremely hard if you're being lied to when your org is so vast that trusting delegated responsible individuals is the realistic way of managing it. Also its probably not going to factor into your bonus.
At my org the CIO knows fuck all about computers. Great guy on a personal level but wouldn't be able to quit Vim even if the lives of his 3 kids depended on it.
He was put there because he was with the company for years before and he led other departments fine.
Since he can't evaluate anything IT related himself he relies on 'advice' from the people beneath him who try to get the most budget for their departments by overstating how important they are.
This layer beneath him is mostly product managers, RTEs etc... (We are SAFE Agile! Developer Velocity, Woohoo!).
They also don't know much about computer and if they do it's very domain specific, such as SAP or so.
These people try to fight for budget by overstating their importance. They demonstrate this by having more apps and more people relying on them.
"Look we handled 2000 support tickets, the company would grind to a halt without us!".
Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.
This keeps going on and on. I have 10 years experience as engineer and wanted to see "the other side" but it's so exhausting.
A few months back a 'privacy officer' asked why the first and last names of our employees were in the Active Directory and ordered them to reduce the privacy risks.
They failed to specify what risks. Couldn't articulate them even when asked. They also didn't say when the risk would've been reduced 'enough'.
The team was panicking as they were now 'non-compliant' with company policy.
I had to intervene personally to make sure this single directive didn't derail our entire company.
> Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.
I’m constantly having to fight people to not add new, inactionable alerts as knee-jerk reactions to incidents. I swear the thought process is “an incident happened, we added a new alert - look, we’re proactive!” instead of, you know, fixing the root causes.
When WeTransfer suddenty changed it's policy for AI training last summer the entire CISO department panicked and had the entire website blocked.
In traffic we could see that 12% of the company used the site daily, transferring gigabytes of data between our engineers and contractors.
I asked why we didn't just start paying WeTransfer since it's so widely used and this would solve the problem, too.
They said they should just use the internal SharePoint file sharing tool.
I asked how this would work since most of WeTransfer use was us receiving docs, not sharing them.
They said the contractors should just update their policy, and that was the end of the debate.
Last time I spoke to a field engineer he said they mostly use private mailboxes now mostly since they "can't even copy something in Outlook anymore" on company laptops.
I decided not to report this to CISO and these docs are workorders and pictures demonstrating workorders have been completed. They're irrelevant one day later.
tbf quitting vim is extremely unintuitive to someone that opened it by accident for the first time.
quitting vi is a basic competency test.
would you listen to a doctor that could not suture a cut? how about a mechanic that could not remove a socket from a ratchet?
simple file editing. vi has been around for every. if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?
(personal anecdote: once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..)
I’d been developing with emacs for years before I learned how to quit vi. Just means he’s never had to change the config on a remote server with a barebones setup :-)
It's more of a cheap gotcha than a valid test. If we take somebody like me, I learned to code in IDEA/PyCharm, these days mostly code with either Zed or OpenCode, and occasionally drop into nano and Positron. I wouldn't be able to do anything in Neovim without looking it up simply because I had no reason to learn it. A doctor who learned practices appropriate in the 20th century might now necessarily be hired for knowledge of these practices today.
I'm certainly not listening to someone who thinks vi is used by every developer
used. maybe not. but cognizant of it. sure. and having used it once or twice.
come on! you are a software expert and you never had to edit a file on a machine where claude was not available?
what would you say about a EE that could not use a scope?
> quitting vi is a basic competency test.
no, its pop quiz bullshit. Oh you know about ":wq"? Well done! But if you don't know, you do it a few times and now you know. It does nothing, outside of teaching you a bit about poor UX.
> if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?
using one of the other available ides?
> once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..
That's not a sign of good judgement, that's a sign of being technically fashionable. It's hipster shit, akin to rejecting a candidate because they're a fan of Taylor Swift and don't know who the band Tool are.
What distinguishes knowing about vim from knowing about virtually anything else? If you apply to a job in tech, you should know that by long-pressing the power button, your PC turns off. Is this pop quiz shit, too? The bar is ridiculously low these days, apparently.
I used `killall vi` from another terminal for years before I finally memorized the proper way to do it.
How did you save the edits you made in vi?
Funny/informative story about this: There was a project, OpenHatch.org c. 2011 that tried to get people to be comfortable enough with programming to contribute to open source projects. In one of the tutorials (I think introducing command-line git?), if you followed the instructions, it would dump you into vim. It hadn't introduced to you vim by that point or explained that's what was happening, so you wouldn't even know enough to google the error. And this was a project that was supposed to be primarily focused on being newbie-friendly!
> I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point
The people who start a company care deeply about the problem they're trying to solve.
The first N employees also care - they're willing to risk working for start-up because they can see the potential and want to help.
But then you hire, say, an accountant. The accountant doesn't care about your mission. You are just another client to them. You need someone to staff the phone or sweep the floors or design the logo or whatever. Why should they care? You're not paying them to care, they're not invested in the company nor its success, and they believe nothing they do for the company will change their personal fortunes.
Then, before you know it, you have a couple of floors filled with people who have no incentive to care.
It is incredibly difficult to run an organisation where everyone is mission driven.
I think a big part of it is that, at some scale, leaders stop lacking access to reality and start lacking incentive to engage with it
About 10 years ago now, when what would eventually become Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had just done an internal launch of the first availability domain, as we got ourselves read for public launch late in the year, several senior staff and engineers had to go do a presentation and demonstration of the product to Larry Ellison.
They did trial run after trial run, made sure trying to make sure there were no bugs in the demonstration path. They nailed it, presentation went smoothly, live demonstration just worked. Provisioned a bare metal instance, had it running hosting something within minutes of launch. Larry was suitably impressed, but the thing that most impressed him was that he'd been presented with an end-to-end live demonstration. It had never occurred to any of the folks involved to do it any other way, but apparently all too often, all he ever saw was slide shows from product teams, particularly when things were several months away from public launch.
I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".
> I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".
I used to work a very small org with an 80+ year old CEO. I feel like half the time the slide decks were unchanged and very little was getting done but I'm not sure the CEO noticed. Given the CEO often sidelined those meetings themselves, by having some bizarre senior moments. So what should be a 30m meeting always became a 2hr+ long one. The guy used to be technical but as you describe it had slipped away from him a long time ago and he had failed to delegate effectively.
Those meetings felt like my real job was just theatre for the boss in some sort of quasi-nursing home stage, where we helped them maintain the illusion they were running an entirely functioning business. I half wonder if in my short time there, I was a mug for actually doing any work.
After 30 working years let me confirm: Every job is performance theater for the people who control the company
Amusing you picked that quote to quote because your job description is a dead ringer for Amazon work culture.
I suspect it's a dead ringer for Corporate America at any large American company.
The later part of that quoted passage ends with a possibly rhetorical question.
> ... When was the last time the CEO of the above company called their own customer support line?
So Bezos definitely hasn't done that in a long time. Definitely not in India. So I would say the answer ought to be: a CEO does that or has to do that only until the company becomes too big or has captured a sufficiently entrenched large slice of the market.
At one meeting to build out a new service as a next generation to a flagship AWS service that I worked on, I got to meet all the product leaders and managers.
At that meeting, I realized most of them had never used the product and see their claim to leadership role due to their the ability to manage up and down.
I use the product on my personal projects and I hated it with a passion.
The fact that showing the actual product in a product meeting triggers panic tells you everything you need to know about how far things have drifted
The story is told in the recent book about Bezos and Amazon. The one by Brad Stone.
In my last role (engineering side) the VP of Product objected to me using the phrase "eating your own dogfood" because it was "gross" and she always interjected and replaced it with "drink your own champagne". I countered (privately) that was a feature; it's supposed to be a little unappetizing because you're early, building empathy and getting a different perspective (to a dog, dog food is delicious!). I think the difference in perspective succinctly illustrates the schism between trying to understand the customer experience asap, and the data-driven, kpi crowd where - conveniently - you can't discover these issues until it's too late.
I think the origin is in the phrase, "Will the dogs eat the dog food?" which was common VC-speak in the 90's and 00's, referencing dog food commercials that once ran on TV, and meaning something like "this has been made to sound great in an internal powerpoint presentation, but will customers actually like it?"
Attributed to a Microsoft exec in the 80s: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/eat-your-own-dog-food-how-micr...
In 2015, Marc Andreessen memorably said of Mixpanel's success at product-led growth: "The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasn’t done any marketing yet." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-adva...
That then led to the idea of "eating your own dog food", because if even you won't eat it, what credibility do you have saying that the other dogs will?
I can't even remember when I first heard this expression in CS. It feels like it was already an idiom when I was in university in the early 90s. It also felt like it was tapping into a general cultural background I already had growing up in California. It did not require any explanation.
Without being able to cite a specific TV ad or other urban legend sort of baseline, it clearly communicated that you hold yourself and your products to a higher standard. As a dog-food producer, you don't just meet the minimum requirements for legal sales, but you make it well enough to be fit for human consumption too.
It's in the same category as someone demonstrating that they could safely drink or breathe byproducts of some other industrial process. And, ironically, there was also a widely understood corollary that we could expect PR types to do something like this while secretly fearing that it would actually harm them.
Yeah, I've never really been at all offended by the "eating your own dogfood" phrase, because I always saw that as being the point also.
I must admit, however, that the title of this article was too crass for me. I came very close to not reading it at all just because of the title. In my opinion, the article would be better served by something else, but I'm just not a big fan of bathroom humor in general.
So you always hold your nose?
> "eating your own dogfood" because it was "gross
Interesting perspective. I watch a YouTube channel of a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog, and even feeds his dog from the skillet where he cooked the meal. Many practical reasons for that but also the dog being the main tool in hunting and getting that food in the first place.
The youtube channel you describe is showing a dog being fed stereotypical cooked "human" food, rather than a human eating "dog" food.
Thank you for clarifying, English is not my native language. In the end I guess different dogs get different quality food.
From my understanding, it's generally for health purposes (though the convenience doesn't hurt). An example my vet provided is that the level of sodium consumption needed by humans is way too high for dogs.
There's an economic benefit: in the UK (and many other countries), ingredients which are not "fit for human consumption" (and might otherwise be thrown away) can be processed into pet food.
Much commercial dog-food is made with ingredients which aren't fit to be consumed by humans.
There was a BBC early-morning breakfast tv slot in which a dog was presented as 'vegetarian', until test time...the dog (given free choice between two bowls of food placed on the studio floor) went immmediiately for the meat dish.
I've heard exactly the same response before and I shared your reaction.
The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?
Yes but isn't it a bit weird to be implying your customers are dogs?
Our customers are morons for using our products and dogs are personable but pretty stupid so yea, makes a lot of sense.
Idk some people love dogs a lot. Maybe more than people!
No. The idea is until it receives the chef’s kiss, it’s dog food.
I think in the analogy that we're the dogs.
Metaphor confuses, literally.
Interesting. I prefer "champagne" as it clarifies the goal: to make something curated, crafted, and desired. I've never interpreted the dogfood v. champagne difference as anti-empathy somehow.
> the goal: to make something curated, crafted, and desired.
None of these are the goal.
The goal is to deliver value. The saying just means to sample your own product, with the implication being that you should be doing some form of quality management. It could just as easily be “play with your own widgets”.
Bougie-fying it to champagne destroys much of the meaning because it literally doesn’t matter what the product is, you should be sampling it no matter how distasteful or irrelevant to your personal interests. You would not have a hard time getting people to sample champagne for their job.
The point is that you're testing something for which you aren't the target user. Champagne is a bad example because champagne manufacturers most certainly themselves imbibe in their own product, in fact they're probably connoisseurs. It's a very different development process to make a product for which you aren't a target customer.
People will drink poor quality champagne after they've had one or two good glasses, so the analogy may be appropriate to modern software development.
Dogfoodung usefully connotes getting off your high horse, getting dirty, getting your face in it. I think it's perfect.
I was trying to articulate to myself why calling it champagne feels like self-deception. And the reason is that to a SE all software is broken, buggy, slow, incomplete, has the wrong feature set, and is not extensible. To us software gets shipped when it stops giving us cold sweats.
For a PM to assume that the product ever becomes champagne feels very naive.
Champagne also explodes if you shake it too much :-).
I think it's sort of the opposite. You're saying that your dog food is of such high quality that even the CEO will eat a can of it. You're saying you hold your product in high esteem, not that you have low self esteem.
Do dogs like champagne?
> getting a different perspective (to a dog, dog food is delicious!)
Didn't you just destroy your own argument? If dog food is expected to be more delicious to dogs than humans, how is eating it supposed to indicate anything about whether it's well-made for the dog? Shouldn't you have your dog eat it, rather than yourself?
So isn't your manager's alternative the one that actually makes sense?
Interesting, I wouldn’t think it matters that much though. If the phrase eating dogfood is unappetising to some when why not use the champagne analogy.
because you lose the meaning over time. Emotional aspects of language can be useful.
George Carlin's famous piece on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
It may amuse, or disturb, to report that a previous boss had an unfortunate mis-translation of the idiom as "eating our own dogshit".
> drink your own champagne
This is a great substitution, and more accurate since humans and dogs have different preferences in food, so humans eating real dogfood is often avoided in practice.
But it's harder to to turn "drink your own champagne" into a gerund like "dogfooding".
Reading this story and related comments, I'm struck folks have lost the history around dogfooding. From what I understand the term really picked up from Paul Maritz.
The saying was - "if you're not eating your own dogfood, you're smoking your own dope."
Very basic idea: is your product good enough that you would use it / consume it for your own needs and purposes? No? Then you are deluding yourself if you think you have a good product.
Simple as that.
How do you get to be a VP while simultaneously being that delicate? My god, eating dogfood as gross is so childish to object to.
What do you mean? Champagne is classy, it matches perfectly the role of VP. These are special, unique people. They will take your unrefined words and use their magic to make it stand out.
In the OP's country, dog food may be considered less desirable than people food.
I always assumed that “eat your own dog food” was a polite-ization of “eat your own dog shit”, lol
Your "feature, not a bug" take is exactly right... the slight unpleasantness is what creates empathy
I’m the kind of person that just assumes customer service is going to be bad. I gird myself whenever I have to call a company and just deal with their gauntlet with patience, knowing the trick is to outlast them. It costs them money every time you call. I’ll often tell them I know that and assure them I will continue calling until the matter is resolved. It’s not fun, it’s just the way things sadly are.
My old man, however, still feels some kind of righteous indignation when he spends his hard earned money and doesn’t feel he’s getting what he paid for. He loves to give a piece of his mind to the companies that mistreat him, and he always says “And I hope my comments are being recorded for quality assurance!”
The new feature of the iPhone where you can put a phone tree on hold until a person answers is very nice. I had a kerfuffle with Delta airlines along with a few thousand other people some days ago. I had to hold for 2.5 hours, but I spent it catching up with my dad and then my phone rang when the CSA was ready for me. I was so fresh and bright on the call I got an upgrade pretty much just for not being a bitch.
Does that actually work reliably? I’m going to use that next time I have to call an insurance company.
It reliably worked for me exactly 1 time I used it, so 100% success rate with unknown variability.
I get it. I also know customer service is a pretty low paying job for something that involves being yelled at all day
I get as frustrated as anyone, but it’s not the fault of the person whose job it is to take my call.
I remember once on the phone with Comcast I just explained the situation and jokingly said look, if it helps, feel free to tell ‘em I’m yelling and screaming. The guy laughed. An engineer called me an hour later with a firmware update for my modem.
Sometimes there’s no winning. But sometimes it helps if you can put people on your team
Yep. When I’m frustrated on the phone with a rep, I always make sure to say something like “I understand this isn’t your fault, but I’m very frustrated with X.”
It seems to ease the tension a bit, anyway.
Angry customers aren't at fault. If all customers are mad as hell when they call, then the company will have to start paying better wages to keep customer support staff from quitting, and they'd rather fix the problem before doing that.
"Eat your own dog-food and smell your own farts" is just crass enough that people will actually remember and retell it. Nice work by the author's Comparative Memetics Division.
"Eat your own dog food" == experience your own product.
"Smell your own farts" == experience your entire product, including things that are typically unmentionables like customer service and billing
The phrase is striking but doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Companies make dogfood and sell it and expect others (dogs, who aren't known for verbalizing dissatisfaction with their food) to consume it. The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is.
But I can't imaging a business which involves collecting farts and selling them to others and where sniffing a small quantity of each bottled fart would help improve production processes to ensure a better experience for the customer. And most people are appalled at the smell of others' farts but can tolerate their own, so the "smell your own" test wouldn't really tell you anything.
You may think you don't need to eat your own dog food (just like the dog food companies), but actually you should still do it.
I am surprised there are so many people on HN that completely miss the point. I am actually shocked. I am not shocked, however, that there are people who get offended. Getting offended is so 202x.
I think the metaphor is less about what you sell and more about the bullshit your customers have to endure to use the product you provide
It doesn’t work here because “sniff your own farts” is already an idiom that means “believe your own bullshit” - aka delusional.
Eating your own dogfood is laudable - sniffing your own farts is not.
Yeah, my mental image before reading the article was the farts analogy would be a company actually trying out the AI chatbot slopware they added to their line of Bluetooth toothbrushes and hyping to investors as the Next Big Thing or something like that.
Right, that's why it's a couplet. Sitting alone like that yes I agree.
Smelling Your Own Dog Farts would also be acceptable...
"Eat your own farts."
Solved it.
The thing about dogfooding is that you have to force it in many domains, and if you aren't careful it can push you towards solving issues your users don't actually have.
We've found ourselves trying to find this balance on Tritium. It's a word processor for lawyers, so has a specific narrow domain that allows us to provide a differentiated experience from Word. But if we try to use it like Word, we end up wanting generalized features that don't fit that strategy. I wrote a little about what we've come up with here: https://tritium.legal/blog/eat.
This is one of the compelling rationales for closed-source / commercial software in certain B2B SAAS domains. It seems like you just cannot adequately test the happy and sad paths from a QA perspective in FOSS unless it's (1) insanely successful or (2) a dev tool.
This describes quite well the huge advantage small companies have vs big companies.
(Motivated) people at small companies "care", and what I mean with that is they are responsible and can see a large enough portion of the customer experience that - if something is broken - they'll see the pain and try to address it.
At a big company no one cares. They of course care about their job, but their job is such a small fraction of the overall customer experience, that seeing their work having an impact on their customer is exceptionally difficult.
That's why large companies need to encode customer feedback into a system to imitate feedback cycles. Mostly in metrics. That's a very lossy way to capture signal, and leaves a lot to be desired, but so far it doesnt seem like anyone has come up with a better system.
> That's why large companies need to encode customer feedback into a system to imitate feedback cycles. Mostly in metrics. That's a very lossy way to capture signal, and leaves a lot to be desired, but so far it doesnt seem like anyone has come up with a better system.
The other thing you can do is having senior leadership occasionally try the product themselves and talk directly to customers (especially ones that have problems).
Often, problems remain because of bureaucratic hurdles, or disputes between different fiefdoms: there's a feature that needs teams X and Y to improve, but it would only help the internal metrics for team X, so team Y doesn't give a shit and drags their feet. Leaders who are sufficiently high in the hierarchy can cut through these sorts of problems if they know and care.
I manage post sales support at a small company where this theme is present, however, I'm concerned that things may be slipping in the wrong direction. I need help dealing with this situation.
Our software engineering team is burdened with tech debt and aggressive product roadmap. Understandably, they often feel the need to push back and keep things under control. Our customers and the employees who are accountable to our customers literally lose sleep when things aren't going well. Our engineering team feels complacent to function on a 9-5 schedule and sleep on critical issues for weeks.
The only thing the engineering team appears motivated to actually own is the next iteration of the escalation process that somehow makes them even less accountable. Invariably the next iteration includes adding more details to Jira tickets that nobody will read.
Basically no one on that team is dogfooding the product. Broken features are being shipped and they are expecting us to actually sell and support this.
>I recorded the call [^For training and monitoring purposes, of course]
Heh I just realized that the "may be recorded" bit could also be interpreted as them giving _you_ permission to record the call
I agree with the broader point, but I'm perplexed that the author is talking about dogfooding as a "sacred practice in the tech industry" in the context of customer support. Among big tech companies, customer support usually isn't seen a part of the product. If you work at Facebook, Google, or Microsoft, you don't try to go through the non-existent consumer support channels to resolve issues with your account.
Interestingly, in the company I currently work for, if an employee encounters a problem with the product, the expected way to report the issue is to open a ticket. Not in an different system with different people responsible for handling it, in the same ticketing system that customers use.
Exactly. That's the "smelling your own farts" part.
To me, "dogfooding" isn't using your own product out of loyalty or some nondescript principle, as the author suggests. It's specifically about using your own product during its development as a means of testing while it's in its worst phase - literally eating dog food for a while.
It's the same horse manure, when architectonauts and developers aren't responsible for the operation of their Goldberg-inventions. Another phrase that comes to mind is: no skin in the game.
To me "unaccountability" -- or whatever naming fits better -- needs its own circle of hell.
Maybe "moral hazard" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
Two stupid calls I've had:
1) I call to cancel an insurance policy on a car I sold. I'm greeted by the IVR, press three to cancel a policy, we're off to a good start. Next follows a long speech about how I need to call a special number if I stuck in the middle east and need to get back home, general precautions I need to take and my rules and rights. All great information, except I've already indicated that I call to cancel a policy. The chance that I'm sitting in an airport in Bahrain, desperately trying to get home, yet I decide that now is a good time to go through and cancel unneeded insurance policies is absolutely zero. You already know why I'm calling, tailor the message to that.
2) Internet is out, for the second week. Customer service dude is typing in stuff, looking stuff up, trying to figure out why the case has been closed. "While we wait let me talk to you about our streaming bundles"... Dude, I know the boss is making you do this, but don't try to upsell a streaming bundle to a customer you can't even get online.
The doctors office is the worst though. Their entire system for guiding you through when to call and where to call take minutes for them to explain. The call it routed to the same people regardless. There are so many confusing and irrelevant messages from the system and in the end you are still routed to the same set of people.
Most of my calls to customer services is because selfservice online absolutely suck and can't do simple things. Every industry could save a fortune in callcenter costs if their websites was ever so slightly better. Often it's not even about being able to selfservice, it can just be providing the tiniest bit of actual information. Your call volume is larger than normal for the past five years, because your stupid website is getting worse every year.
The worst one I've had is that after waiting for about 10 minutes, it passed through to a person who pushed me through the another department, only to end up in the same preselect menu I started the call with but with another option selected which points me to a website where you must enter your question and get an email back with the request to call the service desk and select the option I took in the first place. The circle of help desk life. Kafka would be proud.
This is likely due to them merging two help desks into one making the second part useless as they can no longer see the data they need and thus canceling it entirely since it didn't get the right metrics.
Also turns out that calling the competitors help desk is more useful as they can actually see the thing I was interested in as it is shared between them (fiber connections work schedule when they start to dig, hint they weren't going to). Can't use the competitor since the connections are monopolies...
Here we have an open connect system on fiber in large parts of the country. The ISP lease the fiber each other, power companies or dedicated fiber providers. That means that you can in many areas use the competitors status page to get some idea as to why your connection may be down. The larger ISP do not like being told that you can see that there is an outage in your area, while their own monitoring is all green.
I just assume a lot of product managers have never used their products anymore, and it shows across the industry.
Have you ever tried to play Xbox live after not being signed in for a long time?
Have you ever tried to use smart search terms in the Amazon search box?
Have you ever tried to use these tv channel apps on a Roku?
Do Fridgeaire reps own their own appliances?
I’m just convinced people don’t use their own products where the people that use them and care are so few and far in between things are only getting enshrined.
There was a famous Brown and Williamson phone message, from late last century: https://nypost.com/1999/09/23/smoke-gets-in-your-eyes-when-y...
I actually have a recording of it (scratchy), but won't link it, because it's probably not worth it. It was a riot.
> “The idea came from the women who answer the phones,” said Brown and Williamson spokesman Mark Smith.
Very cool that they did something that wild by trusting the judgement of their call centre employees.
currently on the front page the post directly beneath this one was 25 years of eggs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427224
a happy coincidence.
I know a person. Ex-Googly. Doing his startup. Spent one year on a crazy complex product. Investors do not get it. Users do not get it. He spends 99% of the time explaining why his ideas are so good. You ask to try the product, weeks pass and just slides and video demos. When you eventually try it, it's so confusing and nothing really works. I tried to make him understand that the constraint he needs to fit is users being able to understand rapidly why it's useful to them and that it should work. He does not care. He says it's about the story, and that the story will drive millions unlocking a super big team building his idea. I said that's cool but why in the meantime you don't just go with one thing that is useful and works and then procedurally evolve to your vision while you interact with the user and discover more about their problems. The answer was a one-hour speech on Google leveling system. Maybe he is right. Time will tell.
Some years back I was introduced to UK service consultancy Vanguard (and their "Vanguard Method"), essentially a systems thinking approach to improving service (not to be confused with the enormous US investment management company).
In their world, "smelling your own farts" (ie. listening to and, more importantly, understanding what matters to your customers using normative learning methods) isn't primarily about empathy, it's about getting knowledge so you can understand how to intervene in your company as a system.
Put that way, it's not a waste for decision-makers to listen to customer phonecalls, it's in fact the only way for them to gain the knowledge they need to understand what to do to improve their service (assuming that's their goal).
In hindsight, it is obvious, but I couldn't make out what that synthesized voice was trying to say... She spells-out "approximately".
Just read this - following a similar direction:
https://yuraa.com/2026/03/21/customer-service-as-a-product/
And lying: "Please listen carefully as our menu items have changed". Only once did I get what everyone should use instead: "Please listen carefully to be sure you make the right selection". (Lying is also normalized by "I have read and agree to ....". Maybe better would be: "By clicking this box, you are agreeing to our needlessly lengthy terms, whether or not you have read them."
With a mass product we're all at the mercy of the bottom quantile or even vigintile. These are the people who need to hear about checking website, collecting basic information, etc.
Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service.
Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc.
There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's direct phone number.
Yeah well economies of scale matters more than your sanity
But my own farts smell good
Yes. Talking about it is taboo, but it is quite a common phenomenon when people like the smell of their own farts and bodily odors.
of course they do, until you're sick and then, you know something's off...
Ah, so the minutes long wait hearing answering machine bs is a universal experience. I thought it was a local thing and limited to ISPs, utilities, and financials... When I can choose between competing companies, having a direct line to a human for customer support is at the top of my list. I'm happy with either chat or phone, I just don't want to go through a bot first.
Whenever I have to call an IVR system for support it puts me in a blood rage 98 out of 100 times. This space is the ultimate dark pattern mine field.
My common interactions were with banks and telco companies. Absolute trash.
I'm pretty sure some systems allowed remembering the DTMF menu and press it while the voice recording played. But the recent systems I called did not allow this. It was like they intentionally made people wait to suffer the torture.
People call these systems as a last resort (At least I do). It should be illegal to make them so bad.
Also, I used to work with Telco side guys of these systems and they were very proud of these "capabilities".
Sorry for the rant. I had to vent it out.
Case in point, may every book the author picks up be designed like his website.
Did you, by any chance, hit the "Drunk UI" option on a previous visit?
If so, click one of the other themes at the top.
Customer service has different meanings. Personally I prefer good, simple and effective documentation. I hate having to use a phone to explain problems. It's ok to do it in person, but not my preferred way.
> It's all very well to experience your own product when it is working, but when was the last time anyone in the above organisation went through a "difficult" customer journey.
I kind of prefer companies that build products that never ever need anything. Not even warranty calls, because the thing just keeps on working.
What I noticed in the last few years was that we are too dependent on google search. Now that it sucks, finding high quality information has become harder - and AI trend is further ruining this, as everyone just has the AI summarize stuff now, which does not always work either.
The age old problem. Customer service isn't supposed to be mind numbingly unfathomable, and responding to customers should be easy. Unfortunately, unless higher management engages (is that Bezos or Gates? I've heard both) things will get lost in the mix.
best HN headline of 2026
Dogfooding was a virtuous cycle for user and service provider alike, because incentives were aligned.
Then growth - excuse me, metastasis - came along.
Thanks to metastasis - excuse me, enshittification - we've outgrown dogfooding. We'd used it as a kind of UX gyroscope, something that works to keep us balanced without too much institutional thought or effort. It made us more efficient at competing. Now that the biggest firms are the least threatened by competition, why would they subject themselves to the indignities of the User?
The author should consider smelling his own perfume, given the state and design of the site where he delivers his musings and gives us the moral lecture on not making the lives of one's customers miserable (without a hint of irony).
> given the state and design of the site
Aside from the general policy on HN of not complaining about "tangential annoyances", I don't even see the issue.
> "tangential annoyances"
It's relevant to the central argument of the article, so I don't consider it a tangent (assuming that one even cares about the so-called policy).
My farts always smell good to me.
My dad used to joke that "[Citroen] 2CVs and farts, only the owner enjoys".
Exactly. I like my own farts and I don't mind that everyone else thinks it stinks.
I find the title not very well thought through, because smelling your own farts is unlikely to lead to change.