[themanmaran]

> Now think about a bad software product that you might encounter briefly or you are forced to use: a poorly designed electronic kiosk with 1000ms lag on every interaction, or a hospital electronic system. I think there's a high chance that the people building them rarely use them, or not at all.

To be fair, it would be hard for me to build hospital EHR software if I were also checking myself into the hospital every day.

At my former company we built software for enrolling seniors into Medicare. It was as polished as we could possibly make it, but none of the engineers were 65+ and so pretty hard to dogfood.

[rickydroll]

I'm one of those people who take the bright, shiny trinket that engineers love to show off and, after a few moments, make it start oozing a brown, smelly fluid as I find the flaws.

Another area where people don't dog food anywhere near enough is handicapped accessibility. It's a catch-22 situation where people like me can't write code because their hands or eyes don't work correctly, and those who have the physical ability to write code don't use accessibility tools.

[danaris]

...This is what a QA department is for.

Like, they've been slashed and outsourced and devalued to death over the past several years, but QA is a vital part of the lifecycle of professional software.

And it's not something you can just toss at a bunch of unpaid interns and expect them to do a good job. Being able to properly test software is a valuable skill—and it's one I respect all the more because I don't have it.