> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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, while the CEO made such meetings three times as long as they should take, by having some bizaree senior moments. 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.
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?
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 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.
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 sample champagne for their job.
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 wouldn’t think it matters that much though. If the phrase eating dogfood is unappetising to some when why not use the champagne analogy.
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!”
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.”
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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."
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?
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 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.
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 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.
I will have to think of things like this where can save 5-10 min on something program-wide.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
edit: Nevermind. You shared your thoughts in a later comment above, dismissing the HN forum as vindictive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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, while the CEO made such meetings three times as long as they should take, by having some bizaree senior moments. 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.
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.
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 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.
The youtube channel you describe is showing a dog being fed stereotypical cooked "human" food, rather than a human eating "dog" food.
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 sample champagne for their job.
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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
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!”
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
It seems to ease the tension a bit, anyway.
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.
"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
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.
Eating your own dogfood is laudable - sniffing your own farts is not.
To me "unaccountability" -- or whatever naming fits better -- needs its own circle of hell.
(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.
I actually have a recording of it (scratchy), but won't link it, because it's probably not worth it. It was a riot.
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.
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...
https://yuraa.com/2026/03/21/customer-service-as-a-product/
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).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427224
a happy coincidence.
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.
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.
If so, click one of the other themes at the top.
> 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.
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?
I find the title not very well thought through, because smelling your own farts is unlikely to lead to change.