Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires.
In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.
They did trial run after trial run, made sure trying to make sure there were no bugs in the demonstration path. They nailed it, presentation went smoothly, live demonstration just worked. Provisioned a bare metal instance, had it running hosting something within minutes of launch. Larry was suitably impressed, but the thing that most impressed him was that he'd been presented with an end-to-end live demonstration. It had never occurred to any of the folks involved to do it any other way, but apparently all too often, all he ever saw was slide shows from product teams, particularly when things were several months away from public launch.
I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".
I used to work a very small org with an 80+ year old CEO. I feel like half the time the slide decks were unchanged and very little was getting done but I'm not sure the CEO noticed. Given the CEO often sidelined those meetings themselves, by having some bizarre senior moments. So what should be a 30m meeting always became a 2hr+ long one. The guy used to be technical but as you describe it had slipped away from him a long time ago and he had failed to delegate effectively.
Those meetings felt like my real job was just theatre for the boss in some sort of quasi-nursing home stage, where we helped them maintain the illusion they were running an entirely functioning business. I half wonder if in my short time there, I was a mug for actually doing any work.
I found out SSO was broken. They had to login to every app using the same account. Twice per day because the token live was 4 hours "for security".
I found out it was because they published these apps as PWAs, making them more isolated than normal apps.
I asked the product manager and he says the issue is "with Apple and Google", not his department. When asked why he chose PWAs for the apps he said this was easier to deploy, saves them developer accounts and such.
Since I can't force him to change I found a workaround: SSO works in PWAs if you use Edge on a recent Android version on a Samsung tablet. Lucky me we had bought Samsung tablets (this was not a requirement when purchasing I looked it up, just luck).
I asked the Intune manager about this and they said the field engineers should just set Edge as default in stead of Chrome.
When trying this on a company tablet it said: "Edge disabled by X group policy". That guys' department set the policy...
After they removed this I asked why it wasn't the default browser and he said this wasn't possible. I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.
Later they said they had raised a support ticket with Microsoft for this.
On the internal Wiki I found a document describing the problem. It was dated 11 months before I joined.
It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees)
The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.
I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
I border collied these people into a room and the issue is now fixed.
The system still sucks but 2000 field engineers got 10 min of their days back.
A few weeks later the Scrum Master of the PWA team gave an inspiring talk about it at a conference.
Personally you couldn't torture out of me that my app was so bad for so long, but yeah.
I will have to think of things like this where can save 5-10 min on something program-wide.
I run a business and the passion is still hard to maintain. On Friday one of my customers cussed me out for 20 mins because I took a few hours to respond. That was a tough way to start the weekend.
I'm sure at Apple under Jobs, the % would've been very high. It will have dropped significantly by now.
You're absolutely right on a country-scale though.
It's not that for me. It's learning that the company is a bunch of hot air, all the mission statements and corporate values are total bullshit and only the bottom line matters. The rest is just pr for morale. The leadership doesn't care about anything and will kick us to the kerb whenever it's convenient for them.
Once you look through that bullshit all passion disappears and you just do as little as possible like all the others.
Well, some of us might get promoted if they are a good little drone but I'm not management material so I'm just finding a quiet corner where I can collect my salary with the least amount of work. And just fake all the enthusiasm. Just get AI to post some emoji loaded excited comments when there's an all hands teams meeting.
Anyway that's what turned me off giving a fuck. I did use to care too. Sometimes I still do but it's because I have some project I actually find interesting on a personal/technical level. But most of the work is cutting through bullshit red tape that other teams have made up for us. I'm just caring about my personal development now.
> I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.
I've found that LLMs really democratize debate when issues like this arise!
Can't guarantee you'll win, but when someone bets you're not willing to RTFM to call their bluff-- Oh boy!
edit: Nevermind. You shared your thoughts in a later comment above, dismissing the HN forum as vindictive.
Googling does result with a Gemini/AI response at the top.
Edit: I guess I misunderstood the parent (look in the replies). I hate the phenomenon I’m describing so I’ll leave the comment but I don’t want to besmirch caminante’s good name!
The parent said they were getting stonewalled by a colleague over a T/F. Maybe you're assuming I called the parent a liar...?
Decision tree: Does any department still use IE6? Yes -> lets setup a Remote Desktop cluster so the rest can use Chrome
The U.S. Nuclear Navy, for all of its many flaws, gets this right. Generally at least once a year, the head of Naval Reactors - a four-star Admiral - tours every vessel, which may include a brief underway period. During this tour, the Admiral will talk to the engine room watchstanders, with all senior leadership removed. They’ll ask how daily life is, what they find challenging or annoying, what they like, etc. There’s obviously a lot of self-filtering (though sometimes not - Navy Nukes are not known for their social graces) that occurs, and also what a junior watchstander finds annoying may just be a required part of the job, but some useful signal is gathered.
Even outside of the nuclear program, one standout example was Admiral Zumwalt, who as Chief of Naval Operations implemented 70 different changes over his tenure as a direct result of talking to sailors, all of which were designed to improve quality of life, efficiency, or communication.
Why would you when all of the reports you're getting from your managers are 5/5 stars and "everything's great". Once an organization gets large enough, the information that reaches C-suite has been filtered through so many layers that it barely resembles reality anymore, even when you remove malice from the equation.
He was put there because he was with the company for years before and he led other departments fine.
Since he can't evaluate anything IT related himself he relies on 'advice' from the people beneath him who try to get the most budget for their departments by overstating how important they are.
This layer beneath him is mostly product managers, RTEs etc... (We are SAFE Agile! Developer Velocity, Woohoo!).
They also don't know much about computer and if they do it's very domain specific, such as SAP or so.
These people try to fight for budget by overstating their importance. They demonstrate this by having more apps and more people relying on them.
"Look we handled 2000 support tickets, the company would grind to a halt without us!".
Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.
This keeps going on and on. I have 10 years experience as engineer and wanted to see "the other side" but it's so exhausting.
A few months back a 'privacy officer' asked why the first and last names of our employees were in the Active Directory and ordered them to reduce the privacy risks.
They failed to specify what risks. Couldn't articulate them even when asked. They also didn't say when the risk would've been reduced 'enough'.
The team was panicking as they were now 'non-compliant' with company policy.
I had to intervene personally to make sure this single directive didn't derail our entire company.
I’m constantly having to fight people to not add new, inactionable alerts as knee-jerk reactions to incidents. I swear the thought process is “an incident happened, we added a new alert - look, we’re proactive!” instead of, you know, fixing the root causes.
In traffic we could see that 12% of the company used the site daily, transferring gigabytes of data between our engineers and contractors.
I asked why we didn't just start paying WeTransfer since it's so widely used and this would solve the problem, too.
They said they should just use the internal SharePoint file sharing tool.
I asked how this would work since most of WeTransfer use was us receiving docs, not sharing them.
They said the contractors should just update their policy, and that was the end of the debate.
Last time I spoke to a field engineer he said they mostly use private mailboxes now mostly since they "can't even copy something in Outlook anymore" on company laptops.
I decided not to report this to CISO and these docs are workorders and pictures demonstrating workorders have been completed. They're irrelevant one day later.
You can do this in sharepoint as well. It's not the best, but you can make a link which is for upload-only to a folder and send it to someone so they can send you files without needing an account themselves.
...if it's not disabled by security policy like almost every other vague useful feature in a microsoft product seems to be by IT organisations.
Avoid possibly volatile foods before an important presentation? Understandable.
Avoid sushi for as long as you're employed in this team? Fuck off.
would you listen to a doctor that could not suture a cut? how about a mechanic that could not remove a socket from a ratchet?
simple file editing. vi has been around for every. if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?
(personal anecdote: once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..)
no, its pop quiz bullshit. Oh you know about ":wq"? Well done! But if you don't know, you do it a few times and now you know. It does nothing, outside of teaching you a bit about poor UX.
> if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?
using one of the other available ides?
> once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..
That's not a sign of good judgement, that's a sign of being technically fashionable. It's hipster shit, akin to rejecting a candidate because they're a fan of Taylor Swift and don't know who the band Tool are.
:wq is one of the most insane key combinations to quit an app and this is just hipster shit where people who use vim think they're the only "real engineers". It's just a disgusting level of arrogance and masturbation. The code is what matters, not the IDE. To focus on it as a sign of technical excellence makes a mockery of what engineers are supposed to care about (comp sci things) and replaces them with all the elegance of a high school bully belittling some other kid for not wearing Nikes.
Nah, I bet they suck, why can't they do what I've already done?
(FWIW I agree with pavlus.)
Does vim always happily tell you that its running? It used to be the default diff tool on devices I worked with and IIRC it was just a blank shell in some cases, so it might be non-trivial to work out if you're in it, without knowing it.
So yea, its probably interesting as a challenge but it doesn't prove shit, outside of "you like vim". I like Jetbrains products but I wouldn't assess someone's ability based on how someone might use the products, but rather what they create by using them.
Edit: you keep heavily editing your comment so I will leave this as-is. FYI, you are the only one talking about gatekeeping.
FWIW I still maintain the belief that it is usually a decent indicator of whether you have got the experience to work through unfamiliar tools. It is often a good sign, although not a guarantee.
> FWIW I still maintain the belief that it is usually a decent indicator of whether you have got the experience to work through unfamiliar tools
if you just said that in the first place I'd agree, but that's different. Good engineers are brave and able to just dive into some unknown to get the job done. I'm sure there's been plenty of times where we've been thrust into scenarios where we have to use unfamiliar tech to solve an issue or throw up some infra. However, personally I've never _had_ to use vi, so its not come up, but that's probably because my background is very much a windows one, not a linux/unix one.
> Good engineers are brave and able to just dive into some unknown to get the job done.
I agree. We (I) do it all the time.
Just to circle back on the "pop quiz" point: do we agree that asking loosely relevant trivia questions is not the most effective way to assess ability? I would argue it is more meaningful to be given a task and the space to solve it. To be honest, I do not know how to implement heapsort off the top of my head, but I know how to look up its pseudocode and how it works, and from there, I can translate that into working code.
> that's probably because my background is very much a windows one, not a linux/unix one.
Yes, that explains it. I find no issue with that at all. What matters is the ability to bridge gaps when needed.
yeah. I been interviewing recently and the best interviews are those most like the job, where you either go in on-site and pair with some toy example, or get given some awful existing code and be given an amount of time to achieve a particular goal within that code.
The conversations that fall out of such exercises after they're completed are probably more valuable than the exercise itself.
come on! you are a software expert and you never had to edit a file on a machine where claude was not available?
The people who start a company care deeply about the problem they're trying to solve.
The first N employees also care - they're willing to risk working for start-up because they can see the potential and want to help.
But then you hire, say, an accountant. The accountant doesn't care about your mission. You are just another client to them. You need someone to staff the phone or sweep the floors or design the logo or whatever. Why should they care? You're not paying them to care, they're not invested in the company nor its success, and they believe nothing they do for the company will change their personal fortunes.
Then, before you know it, you have a couple of floors filled with people who have no incentive to care.
It is incredibly difficult to run an organisation where everyone is mission driven.
At that meeting, I realized most of them had never used the product and see their claim to leadership role due to their the ability to manage up and down.
I use the product on my personal projects and I hated it with a passion.
> ... When was the last time the CEO of the above company called their own customer support line?
So Bezos definitely hasn't done that in a long time. Definitely not in India. So I would say the answer ought to be: a CEO does that or has to do that only until the company becomes too big or has captured a sufficiently entrenched large slice of the market.
The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?
Many people aren’t just openly hostile, they make a point to immediately let you know they aren’t here to help, they’re here to make everyone’s life less pleasant.
With people, there are many scenarios where if you’re out of line, disagree, that’s it. You’re done. They’ll never ever consider you worth any reasonable sort of treatment.
Dogs, by comparison, are angels.
None of these are the goal.
The goal is to deliver value. The saying just means to sample your own product, with the implication being that you should be doing some form of quality management. It could just as easily be “play with your own widgets”.
Bougie-fying it to champagne destroys much of the meaning because it literally doesn’t matter what the product is, you should be sampling it no matter how distasteful or irrelevant to your personal interests. You would not have a hard time getting people to sample champagne for their job.
For a PM to assume that the product ever becomes champagne feels very naive.
Interesting perspective. I watch a YouTube channel of a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog, and even feeds his dog from the skillet where he cooked the meal. Many practical reasons for that but also the dog being the main tool in hunting and getting that food in the first place.
> "a hunter who routinely cooks the same meal for himself and his dog"
The youtube channel you describe is showing a dog being fed stereotypical cooked "human" food, rather than a human eating "dog" food.
Much commercial dog-food is made with ingredients which aren't fit to be consumed by humans.
George Carlin's famous piece on it:
I must admit, however, that the title of this article was too crass for me. I came very close to not reading it at all just because of the title. In my opinion, the article would be better served by something else, but I'm just not a big fan of bathroom humor in general.
Attributed to a Microsoft exec in the 80s: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/eat-your-own-dog-food-how-micr...
In 2015, Marc Andreessen memorably said of Mixpanel's success at product-led growth: "The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasn’t done any marketing yet." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-adva...
That then led to the idea of "eating your own dog food", because if even you won't eat it, what credibility do you have saying that the other dogs will?
Without being able to cite a specific TV ad or other urban legend sort of baseline, it clearly communicated that you hold yourself and your products to a higher standard. As a dog-food producer, you don't just meet the minimum requirements for legal sales, but you make it well enough to be fit for human consumption too.
It's in the same category as someone demonstrating that they could safely drink or breathe byproducts of some other industrial process. And, ironically, there was also a widely understood corollary that we could expect PR types to do something like this while secretly fearing that it would actually harm them.
If you aren't willing to eat your own "dog food" because it's "less good", then you are making shitty dog food!
The entire point is that you should strive to be a company that makes dog food so good that you would be happy to eat it as not-a-dog because it's above and beyond the bar!
If you are unwilling to use your own product, fix that
This is a great substitution, and more accurate since humans and dogs have different preferences in food, so humans eating real dogfood is often avoided in practice.
But it's harder to to turn "drink your own champagne" into a gerund like "dogfooding".
Didn't you just destroy your own argument? If dog food is expected to be more delicious to dogs than humans, how is eating it supposed to indicate anything about whether it's well-made for the dog? Shouldn't you have your dog eat it, rather than yourself?
So isn't your manager's alternative the one that actually makes sense?
The saying was - "if you're not eating your own dogfood, you're smoking your own dope."
Very basic idea: is your product good enough that you would use it / consume it for your own needs and purposes? No? Then you are deluding yourself if you think you have a good product.
Simple as that.
You just let her know that the colloquial meaning of that phrase is to drink ones own urine.
My old man, however, still feels some kind of righteous indignation when he spends his hard earned money and doesn’t feel he’s getting what he paid for. He loves to give a piece of his mind to the companies that mistreat him, and he always says “And I hope my comments are being recorded for quality assurance!”
I get as frustrated as anyone, but it’s not the fault of the person whose job it is to take my call.
I remember once on the phone with Comcast I just explained the situation and jokingly said look, if it helps, feel free to tell ‘em I’m yelling and screaming. The guy laughed. An engineer called me an hour later with a firmware update for my modem.
Sometimes there’s no winning. But sometimes it helps if you can put people on your team
It seems to ease the tension a bit, anyway.
"Eat your own dog food" == experience your own product.
"Smell your own farts" == experience your entire product, including things that are typically unmentionables like customer service and billing
Companies make dogfood and sell it and expect others (dogs, who aren't known for verbalizing dissatisfaction with their food) to consume it. The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is.
But I can't imaging a business which involves collecting farts and selling them to others and where sniffing a small quantity of each bottled fart would help improve production processes to ensure a better experience for the customer. And most people are appalled at the smell of others' farts but can tolerate their own, so the "smell your own" test wouldn't really tell you anything.
>The producers of dogfood don't really care what it tastes like or how nutritious it is.
You may think you don't need to eat your own dog food (just like the dog food companies), but actually you should still do it.
Eating your own dogfood is laudable - sniffing your own farts is not.
Solved it.
Smelling Your Own Dog Farts would also be acceptable...
We've found ourselves trying to find this balance on Tritium. It's a word processor for lawyers, so has a specific narrow domain that allows us to provide a differentiated experience from Word. But if we try to use it like Word, we end up wanting generalized features that don't fit that strategy. I wrote a little about what we've come up with here: https://tritium.legal/blog/eat.
This is one of the compelling rationales for closed-source / commercial software in certain B2B SAAS domains. It seems like you just cannot adequately test the happy and sad paths from a QA perspective in FOSS unless it's (1) insanely successful or (2) a dev tool.
(Motivated) people at small companies "care", and what I mean with that is they are responsible and can see a large enough portion of the customer experience that - if something is broken - they'll see the pain and try to address it.
At a big company no one cares. They of course care about their job, but their job is such a small fraction of the overall customer experience, that seeing their work having an impact on their customer is exceptionally difficult.
That's why large companies need to encode customer feedback into a system to imitate feedback cycles. Mostly in metrics. That's a very lossy way to capture signal, and leaves a lot to be desired, but so far it doesnt seem like anyone has come up with a better system.
Our software engineering team is burdened with tech debt and aggressive product roadmap. Understandably, they often feel the need to push back and keep things under control. Our customers and the employees who are accountable to our customers literally lose sleep when things aren't going well. Our engineering team feels complacent to function on a 9-5 schedule and sleep on critical issues for weeks.
The only thing the engineering team appears motivated to actually own is the next iteration of the escalation process that somehow makes them even less accountable. Invariably the next iteration includes adding more details to Jira tickets that nobody will read.
Basically no one on that team is dogfooding the product. Broken features are being shipped and they are expecting us to actually sell and support this.
1. There needs to be reframing of the engineer role in the team, by the leadership. It's not just to build things, but to help the customer. The job of the engineer is to build a good product for the customer, not just to "build", fix Jiras, ...
2. At the same time, get some engineers on customer calls. It doesnt need to be everyone, but you need to shorten the feedback cycle that engineers directly get signal from their users. A lot of information gets lost through Jira's, intermediates, ...
They dont have need talk, just listen. Will they pay attention? That comes back to the reframing of their job being to create a good product for users. If everyone understands that's the goal, they will.
If you have engineers building custom extensions for your database, because your CRM product needs some low level performance optimizations - it'll still be good but less interesting.
The goal is to get some engineers talking to customers, cause they'll talk to other engineers. And engineers know how to talk to engineers. It'll shorten the feedback cycle, and that's good for both speed + signal.
Now I don't know how much of that you already do, and they might even do all these things already, and what you see is the output of the worst issues already taken care of. If the latter is the case, there's some more cross team comms needed
The other thing you can do is having senior leadership occasionally try the product themselves and talk directly to customers (especially ones that have problems).
Often, problems remain because of bureaucratic hurdles, or disputes between different fiefdoms: there's a feature that needs teams X and Y to improve, but it would only help the internal metrics for team X, so team Y doesn't give a shit and drags their feet. Leaders who are sufficiently high in the hierarchy can cut through these sorts of problems if they know and care.
To me "unaccountability" -- or whatever naming fits better -- needs its own circle of hell.
1) I call to cancel an insurance policy on a car I sold. I'm greeted by the IVR, press three to cancel a policy, we're off to a good start. Next follows a long speech about how I need to call a special number if I stuck in the middle east and need to get back home, general precautions I need to take and my rules and rights. All great information, except I've already indicated that I call to cancel a policy. The chance that I'm sitting in an airport in Bahrain, desperately trying to get home, yet I decide that now is a good time to go through and cancel unneeded insurance policies is absolutely zero. You already know why I'm calling, tailor the message to that.
2) Internet is out, for the second week. Customer service dude is typing in stuff, looking stuff up, trying to figure out why the case has been closed. "While we wait let me talk to you about our streaming bundles"... Dude, I know the boss is making you do this, but don't try to upsell a streaming bundle to a customer you can't even get online.
The doctors office is the worst though. Their entire system for guiding you through when to call and where to call take minutes for them to explain. The call it routed to the same people regardless. There are so many confusing and irrelevant messages from the system and in the end you are still routed to the same set of people.
Most of my calls to customer services is because selfservice online absolutely suck and can't do simple things. Every industry could save a fortune in callcenter costs if their websites was ever so slightly better. Often it's not even about being able to selfservice, it can just be providing the tiniest bit of actual information. Your call volume is larger than normal for the past five years, because your stupid website is getting worse every year.
This is likely due to them merging two help desks into one making the second part useless as they can no longer see the data they need and thus canceling it entirely since it didn't get the right metrics.
Also turns out that calling the competitors help desk is more useful as they can actually see the thing I was interested in as it is shared between them (fiber connections work schedule when they start to dig, hint they weren't going to). Can't use the competitor since the connections are monopolies...
> It's all very well to experience your own product when it is working, but when was the last time anyone in the above organisation went through a "difficult" customer journey.
I kind of prefer companies that build products that never ever need anything. Not even warranty calls, because the thing just keeps on working.
What I noticed in the last few years was that we are too dependent on google search. Now that it sucks, finding high quality information has become harder - and AI trend is further ruining this, as everyone just has the AI summarize stuff now, which does not always work either.
Same. If things have gotten to the point where I need to talk to a human (either or phone or mail) to be made whole, the product has already failed and I should look for alternatives the next time I need whatever it may be.
I actually have a recording of it (scratchy), but won't link it, because it's probably not worth it. It was a riot.
Very cool that they did something that wild by trusting the judgement of their call centre employees.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47427224
a happy coincidence.
In their world, "smelling your own farts" (ie. listening to and, more importantly, understanding what matters to your customers using normative learning methods) isn't primarily about empathy, it's about getting knowledge so you can understand how to intervene in your company as a system.
Put that way, it's not a waste for decision-makers to listen to customer phonecalls, it's in fact the only way for them to gain the knowledge they need to understand what to do to improve their service (assuming that's their goal).
Have you ever tried to play Xbox live after not being signed in for a long time?
Have you ever tried to use smart search terms in the Amazon search box?
Have you ever tried to use these tv channel apps on a Roku?
Do Fridgeaire reps own their own appliances?
I’m just convinced people don’t use their own products where the people that use them and care are so few and far in between things are only getting enshrined.
Consider the alternative.
Then growth - excuse me, metastasis - came along.
Thanks to metastasis - excuse me, enshittification - we've outgrown dogfooding. We'd used it as a kind of UX gyroscope, something that works to keep us balanced without too much institutional thought or effort. It made us more efficient at competing. Now that the biggest firms are the least threatened by competition, why would they subject themselves to the indignities of the User?
Everyone who works with regular consumers, from doctors to shop assistants, knows this. And everyone who manages these first lines knows how much it costs. Hence the queue, the reminders, the redirection to self-service.
Also, this is how you can instantly establish your own competence and be treated seriously. Just go into the basic context and what you need straight from the hello, have documents at hand, even just loaded on your phone, etc.
There's usually also a second queue. Various "premium" offers (like higher inflows bank account) or just having someone's direct phone number.
Heh I just realized that the "may be recorded" bit could also be interpreted as them giving _you_ permission to record the call
Aside from the general policy on HN of not complaining about "tangential annoyances", I don't even see the issue.
It's relevant to the central argument of the article, so I don't consider it a tangent (assuming that one even cares about the so-called policy).
My common interactions were with banks and telco companies. Absolute trash.
I'm pretty sure some systems allowed remembering the DTMF menu and press it while the voice recording played. But the recent systems I called did not allow this. It was like they intentionally made people wait to suffer the torture.
People call these systems as a last resort (At least I do). It should be illegal to make them so bad.
Also, I used to work with Telco side guys of these systems and they were very proud of these "capabilities".
Sorry for the rant. I had to vent it out.
If so, click one of the other themes at the top.
I find the title not very well thought through, because smelling your own farts is unlikely to lead to change.