Hacker News Reader

> to understand what the needs where (we don't use telemetry/spying) And it took a lot of time...

Don’t worry, good design work takes time by very definition. Telemetry/spying does not magically fix that, and instead tends to lead to worse designs because people miss the forest for the trees.

Would love to see the work!

View on HN

Agreed, telemetry is a classic case of "more data is not better data".

With a smaller number of organized sessions, you can still collect telemetry (without spying), and you can also collect all sorts of information that telemetry just won't give you.

I suspect that a hands-on approach can be cheaper, too. It's just not any fun because it doesn't give you an excuse to play with your company's Snowflake warehouse.

I think there are certain things that are hard to achieve without telemetry. Like answering the question of "how many users will finally remove (hopefully) deprecated feature X affect?" or "Does anyone actually use this on platform Y?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com