3 ms·
One danger about "eating your own dog food" is that your entire company can get blind to the faults they forced themselves to overcome/stomach initially. "Eati
by thorax 19y ago
One danger about "eating your own dog food" is that your entire company can get blind to the faults they forced themselves to overcome/stomach initially.
"Eating your own dog food" gets you to find major flaws that get it working for yourself, but once it is "working for you" (even if that took a lot of workarounds and sacrifices) you've become accustomed to it "not being as bad as it was".
Working at a major MS partner and seeing Longhorn alphas/CTPs/betas/etc, I got a sense that they got too much into "this is acceptable" mindset while others were screaming "don't ship, don't go, ouch, danger".
This doesn't imply that eating your own dog food is bad. But perhaps you should always be aware that you can fry your taste buds on bad dog food.
I think it might be better to swap eating your competitor's dogfood and your own every other month or so to keep it fresh.
- kalid 19y agoYes, very much agree. I used to work at MS and one problem is that many employees (even devs) have no experience with the other people's dogfood, ie. Linux/UNIX. Because of this, you'd have situations where people would want to write C to make a quick string parsing tool, rather than perl or bash script. If you're the CEO of Coke, you'd better know what Pepsi tastes like. "Company Loyalty" can be a convenient excuse for ignorance of the competition.