4 ms·

Twilio is the same. They use Zoom & Slack internally, not their own video and chat offerings. Dogfooding is a good thing. You’d be surprised how few companie

Twilio is the same. They use Zoom & Slack internally, not their own video and chat offerings. Dogfooding is a good thing. You’d be surprised how few companies actually do it (which is terribly shocking).

Thaxll 4y ago
This sounds terrible, it shows a lack of confidence in your own product, imagine if Google internally would use Zoom... I can tell you that devs that use their own product deliver better quality.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  The sound quality and filtering on Zoom is noticeably better than on Meets. Perhaps you also need to use the product that your competitors use to understand what you need to beat.
  - Thaxll 4y ago
    For testing and strategy maybe not for day to day use.
    - airstrike 4y ago
      Maybe alternate between the leading product and your own so you can experience the same pain users do when they are forced to use the inferior choice after becoming accustomed to best-in-class.
  - neurostimulant 4y ago
    I'm sure Google Meets works flawlessly at Google's office (presumably a short hop away to their data centers via dedicated fiber optics link).
    - lazide 4y ago
      Google has invested heavily in sound management in their rooms, and issued noise cancelling headphones to everyone awhile back they got to take home. That might explain some things.
      - mcqueenjordan 4y ago
        But isn't Google Meet's background noise cancellation far superior to that of Zoom's? Or maybe I misunderstood your comment. EDIT: I see above that others have claimed the opposite, but my experience has been different. I simply cannot take a call from a cafe in Zoom without complaints, but Meets is regularly tolerable, according to those I meet with.
        jhugo 4y ago
        If you use Zoom & Google Meet in the browser, the audio processing is likely pretty much the same (most of the filtering is built-in to the WebRTC stack). Zoom's native app has noticeably worse audio, but pretty much everything about it is worse anyway — it's just a pity you have to click through the "download the app" dark pattern to get to their better browser experience.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Well, optimally you would want to use both yours and your competitors' products.
- SaltySolomon 4y ago
  I mean, it also creates a circular dependency, if you have an issue with your own product and trying to fix it then you can suddenly not communicate.
  - mattnewton 4y ago
    That’s why SRE teams at companies I have been at always keep an IRC server hosted separately from all their other infra.
  - grensley 4y ago
    The Facebook outage last year being a great example of this. They lost basically all internal communications.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      Is there a public write-up or blog post about it? It sounds interesting to read about!
      - grensley 4y ago
        Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage Their report: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/update-about-the-october-4th-outage https://www.facebook.com/business/news/update-about-the-octo...
- sjtgraham 4y ago
  Then why does Google Meet suck?
- cachvico 4y ago
  This is a good question. Does Google use Meet? Are they still subject to the frankly ridiculous max resolution of 720p?
throwaway5752 4y ago
"Dogfooding is a good thing" That gets repeated a lot but I have observed the opposite when you have a diversified company dogfooding an internal product that isn't strategic in their portfolio, or is targeted at a market segment that the company doesn't belong to. I have seen companies hamstring themselves by using a product that isn't the best offering for them or a poor technical fit, only because it is their own offering. Also, in the worst case, companies become develop tunnel vision in the market, because they don't regularly use the competition. If you have a large, international software company targeting small to medium business customers in the US, dogfooding would be counterproductive. It would probably harm their strategic customer base by overcomplicating their product with features they don't need at the same time it slows the parent company down by using a product that's poor fit.
- pseudostem 4y ago
  Fanboy Alert! (I may be biased). Not a company, but OpenBSD dogfoods exclusively. And they do deliver a good product.
  - throwaway5752 4y ago
    OpenBSD sure does - also a fan - and dogfooding can be a really good thing. But one has to approach it critically and sensibly.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Yup. The idea behind dogfooding is that you get more/better feedback and more internal pressure to fix problems. But the product team should already be getting feedback from a diverse set of customers. And if they're not, that's what needs to be fixed. Dogfooding can also result in overprioritizing only your own company's product needs, and at worst the ultra specific issues that one particularly vocal VP is having, to the detriment of the overall customer base. (I've seen it happen way too many times.) Companies should use the best tools for the job, not necessarily the ones they make themselves. If those are the same, then great. If not, then also great.
- ridgered4 4y ago
umvi 4y ago
In the case of GP he is saying they want to dogfood their product but cannot due to legal reasons.
bombcar 4y ago
It makes sense to me - if Twilio undergoes a massive outage, do you want them to be unable to communicate as they try to fix it? So they use Zoom and Slack.
- antihero 4y ago
  Just have that stuff as a backup?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    That can also work - but backups that aren't used can atrophy - and market segments could mean that what "works" for the company isn't what the company is selling. It might be a goal to move everything internal (I believe Google is now using Google Apps internally, but they didn't for awhile, even after other businesses were).
- loriverkutya 4y ago
  They could use staging. Or the solution they have in place in case they have a video conference system outage while they are fixing their own outage.
- bnt 4y ago
  Email? “Massive outage” for Twilio would bring down a lot of products, they would have to be back up in minutes.
juliansimioni 4y ago
Dogfooding can often be a good thing but not if your target customer is a very different type of business than your own. For example, Stripe is a _very_ large company but their product is geared mostly towards small and medium size businesses. It's very possible that in the process of making Stripe Billing work for Stripe, they'd make it work less well for their actual customers. It's the same reason why Intuit probably doesn't use QuickBooks to do their accounting.
- spartanatreyu 4y ago
  ^ This. When dogfooding, you have to be very careful that you don't end up in a bubble and only see your own needs as the priority. There's a propensity for developers to start using their own products then changing it to suit themselves thinking that the regular users use the same product the same way. You end up with this mismatch of expectations and it can even get so bad that the developers don't believe the users who tell them that things need to change.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
twstdzppr 4y ago
There's got to be a better term than "dogfooding"
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  "Use your own product" was too simple and direct.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    "Using your/their own product" is six syllables. Dogfooding is half that. In the version without "ing", that's 5 versus 2 syllables.
- simianpirate 4y ago
  A salesperson that I worked closely with like to use: “Drinking our own champagne.” I liked it enough I started using it though the engineer in me tends to be fine with “dogfooding”.
- phyzome 4y ago
  Why? Keeps you humble.
  - twstdzppr 4y ago
    Fine, fine. But I'm going with 'Cat-Chowing' instead.
duxup 4y ago
Dogfooding is a good thing. However, I find it can get tiresome / has potential compilations. Customer's can be terrible with incomplete, bad idea, and nonsensical requests. But sometimes internally you get the worst "Someone spilled some words into email that don't sense / no you don't actually want that / bro this is accounting software not Photoshop." situations that folks who are more familiar with the origination might make, but customer's might not make. It takes an extra level of internal discipline to deal with dogfooding side effects at times IMO. Still, a good idea none the less.
hnlmorg 4y ago
I’m definitely in favour of dogfooding. But it’s worth noting that there is still a positive flip side to using competitors products: + you get to keep up with their advances so you’re not relying on your customers telling you about your competition + in the case of chat apps, if your infrastructure goes down you can still work as a team to coordinate the remediation

Thaxll 4y ago

This sounds terrible, it shows a lack of confidence in your own product, imagine if Google internally would use Zoom... I can tell you that devs that use their own product deliver better quality.

dghlsakjg 4y ago
The sound quality and filtering on Zoom is noticeably better than on Meets. Perhaps you also need to use the product that your competitors use to understand what you need to beat.
- Thaxll 4y ago
  For testing and strategy maybe not for day to day use.
  - airstrike 4y ago
    Maybe alternate between the leading product and your own so you can experience the same pain users do when they are forced to use the inferior choice after becoming accustomed to best-in-class.
- neurostimulant 4y ago
  I'm sure Google Meets works flawlessly at Google's office (presumably a short hop away to their data centers via dedicated fiber optics link).
  - lazide 4y ago
    Google has invested heavily in sound management in their rooms, and issued noise cancelling headphones to everyone awhile back they got to take home. That might explain some things.
    - mcqueenjordan 4y ago
      But isn't Google Meet's background noise cancellation far superior to that of Zoom's? Or maybe I misunderstood your comment. EDIT: I see above that others have claimed the opposite, but my experience has been different. I simply cannot take a call from a cafe in Zoom without complaints, but Meets is regularly tolerable, according to those I meet with.
      - jhugo 4y ago
        If you use Zoom & Google Meet in the browser, the audio processing is likely pretty much the same (most of the filtering is built-in to the WebRTC stack). Zoom's native app has noticeably worse audio, but pretty much everything about it is worse anyway — it's just a pity you have to click through the "download the app" dark pattern to get to their better browser experience.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Well, optimally you would want to use both yours and your competitors' products.
SaltySolomon 4y ago
I mean, it also creates a circular dependency, if you have an issue with your own product and trying to fix it then you can suddenly not communicate.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  That’s why SRE teams at companies I have been at always keep an IRC server hosted separately from all their other infra.
- grensley 4y ago
  The Facebook outage last year being a great example of this. They lost basically all internal communications.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    Is there a public write-up or blog post about it? It sounds interesting to read about!
    - grensley 4y ago
      Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage Their report: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/update-about-the-october-4th-outage https://www.facebook.com/business/news/update-about-the-octo...
sjtgraham 4y ago
Then why does Google Meet suck?
cachvico 4y ago
This is a good question. Does Google use Meet? Are they still subject to the frankly ridiculous max resolution of 720p?

throwaway5752 4y ago

"Dogfooding is a good thing" That gets repeated a lot but I have observed the opposite when you have a diversified company dogfooding an internal product that isn't strategic in their portfolio, or is targeted at a market segment that the company doesn't belong to. I have seen companies hamstring themselves by using a product that isn't the best offering for them or a poor technical fit, only because it is their own offering. Also, in the worst case, companies become develop tunnel vision in the market, because they don't regularly use the competition. If you have a large, international software company targeting small to medium business customers in the US, dogfooding would be counterproductive. It would probably harm their strategic customer base by overcomplicating their product with features they don't need at the same time it slows the parent company down by using a product that's poor fit.

pseudostem 4y ago
Fanboy Alert! (I may be biased). Not a company, but OpenBSD dogfoods exclusively. And they do deliver a good product.
- throwaway5752 4y ago
  OpenBSD sure does - also a fan - and dogfooding can be a really good thing. But one has to approach it critically and sensibly.
crazygringo 4y ago
Yup. The idea behind dogfooding is that you get more/better feedback and more internal pressure to fix problems. But the product team should already be getting feedback from a diverse set of customers. And if they're not, that's what needs to be fixed. Dogfooding can also result in overprioritizing only your own company's product needs, and at worst the ultra specific issues that one particularly vocal VP is having, to the detriment of the overall customer base. (I've seen it happen way too many times.) Companies should use the best tools for the job, not necessarily the ones they make themselves. If those are the same, then great. If not, then also great.
ridgered4 4y ago

umvi 4y ago

In the case of GP he is saying they want to dogfood their product but cannot due to legal reasons.

bombcar 4y ago

It makes sense to me - if Twilio undergoes a massive outage, do you want them to be unable to communicate as they try to fix it? So they use Zoom and Slack.

antihero 4y ago
Just have that stuff as a backup?
- bombcar 4y ago
  That can also work - but backups that aren't used can atrophy - and market segments could mean that what "works" for the company isn't what the company is selling. It might be a goal to move everything internal (I believe Google is now using Google Apps internally, but they didn't for awhile, even after other businesses were).
loriverkutya 4y ago
They could use staging. Or the solution they have in place in case they have a video conference system outage while they are fixing their own outage.
bnt 4y ago
Email? “Massive outage” for Twilio would bring down a lot of products, they would have to be back up in minutes.

juliansimioni 4y ago

Dogfooding can often be a good thing but not if your target customer is a very different type of business than your own. For example, Stripe is a _very_ large company but their product is geared mostly towards small and medium size businesses. It's very possible that in the process of making Stripe Billing work for Stripe, they'd make it work less well for their actual customers. It's the same reason why Intuit probably doesn't use QuickBooks to do their accounting.

spartanatreyu 4y ago
^ This. When dogfooding, you have to be very careful that you don't end up in a bubble and only see your own needs as the priority. There's a propensity for developers to start using their own products then changing it to suit themselves thinking that the regular users use the same product the same way. You end up with this mismatch of expectations and it can even get so bad that the developers don't believe the users who tell them that things need to change.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

twstdzppr 4y ago

There's got to be a better term than "dogfooding"

nsxwolf 4y ago
"Use your own product" was too simple and direct.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  "Using your/their own product" is six syllables. Dogfooding is half that. In the version without "ing", that's 5 versus 2 syllables.
simianpirate 4y ago
A salesperson that I worked closely with like to use: “Drinking our own champagne.” I liked it enough I started using it though the engineer in me tends to be fine with “dogfooding”.
phyzome 4y ago
Why? Keeps you humble.
- twstdzppr 4y ago
  Fine, fine. But I'm going with 'Cat-Chowing' instead.

duxup 4y ago

Dogfooding is a good thing. However, I find it can get tiresome / has potential compilations. Customer's can be terrible with incomplete, bad idea, and nonsensical requests. But sometimes internally you get the worst "Someone spilled some words into email that don't sense / no you don't actually want that / bro this is accounting software not Photoshop." situations that folks who are more familiar with the origination might make, but customer's might not make. It takes an extra level of internal discipline to deal with dogfooding side effects at times IMO. Still, a good idea none the less.

hnlmorg 4y ago

I’m definitely in favour of dogfooding. But it’s worth noting that there is still a positive flip side to using competitors products: + you get to keep up with their advances so you’re not relying on your customers telling you about your competition + in the case of chat apps, if your infrastructure goes down you can still work as a team to coordinate the remediation