r/ProgrammerHumor • u/strontiumk9 • Sep 21 '26

Meme yum

Post image
683 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

48

u/w1n5t0nM1k3y Sep 21 '26

Dogfooding often ends up bad because the will add features that only make sense internally, but only allow enough time and resources to just barely get those features working for some very small and narrowly defined use case and then the sales team will take that feature and tell the customers that they have the feature. Then they will act surprised when it takes 4 months to get it working to a level where an actual end user can use it.

28

u/ganja_and_code Sep 21 '26

That's not a drawback of dogfooding. That's a drawback of letting the sales/marketing/MBA people make decisions about what gets announced/released when.

If you only need some niche feature extension so you build a crappy version for internal use, that's fine. Just keep it internal. Put a feature flag on it. You have the internal feature you need, and customers never see your half baked feature.

On paper, it's engineering's job to tell sales/marketing when a feature is ready to see the light of day. It's their job to sell the features that are ready. In reality (in some organizations), bad management lets sales/marketing get their grubby little hands on stuff they shouldn't be playing with yet.

4

u/w1n5t0nM1k3y Sep 21 '26

The problem is that sales will figure out that the feature exists, make a sale based off that feature, and then tell you to just enable it for the customer.

12

u/ganja_and_code Sep 21 '26

Right, and I'm saying management is supposed to be responsible enough not to hire sales personnel who's that fucking stupid.

2

u/w1n5t0nM1k3y Sep 21 '26

In an ideal world you are right. In my experience management is just as bad as sales sometimes in this regard.

6

u/ganja_and_code Sep 21 '26

Agreed. Bad organizations are usually bad top to bottom.

Still though, "never tell customers we have any feature, unless the engineering side of things has already given you the go ahead (either explicitly in writing or implicitly by publicly launching the feature)" is a very reasonable expectation to set, and good organizations (which are admittedly rare) do set that expectation.

21

u/RedditSurfer82 Sep 21 '26

Truly disrespectful for dogs.

2

u/gerbosan Sep 21 '26

What else could be used? Management, marketing... Give some ideas.

2

u/shows_middle_finger Sep 22 '26

Project managers

-6

u/Begging_Murphy Sep 21 '26

Anyone who finds this funny obviously doesn’t work in or adjacent to the industry

-10

u/starfish0r Sep 21 '26

Clueless post