As they say, there are an infinite ways to fail but only a few paths to success. If your engineering is so out of control you're constantly in crisis mode, you

As they say, there are an infinite ways to fail but only a few paths to success. If your engineering is so out of control you're constantly in crisis mode, you have more important problems than customer empathy. I think that's an orthogonal issue. It's not about asking engineers to do support because you don't have any support capacity. At Olark, we also have a dedicated customer support team. Same thing at FreshBooks where I used to work that also does all hands support. These teams are professionals, and are responsible for ensuring we have world class support practices. So, we don't ask the engineers (or marketing or design) to be on support because no one else will do it. It's just the way we keep everyone close to the customer. The Jeff Bezos story in Steve Yegge's post is exactly the reason why I like working at companies that keep engineers close to the customer. It cuts down the BS of opinionated product people thinking they know what customers want when they don't have real experience with customers.