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Comment by tennisflyi | Hacker News Reader

Has Undercover Boss taught nothing. Things are never how you think they’ll be with boots on the grounds. DoorDash was so right making devs do like an hour of actual gigging. Yeah, shit is really pretty and seamless from your Herman Miller chair and Uplift desk…

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Yeah builders should understand the domain they're building for as well as humanly possible. On the topic of chairs, imagine the difference between a chair built by someone who has never sat in one, and someone who is absolutely passionate about sitting in chairs and is looking to build the perfect most comfortable one. It's actually deranged that such a large portion of the software industry has built up an insane game of telephone between the builders and the users and convinced people that it's an essential practice for success.

This is also true for regulatory regimes. I've been shocked at how cavalierly some regulators will treat decisions that have career altering consequences for those being regulated.

It doesn't just affect the regulations, it also means their entire mental model of how the regulated will behave can be wrong.

This is what happens when you view your job as "make regulations" (or even worse, enforce the ideological will of $PERSON on $INDUSTRY) instead of "make $INDUSTRY safer and better for consumers and the public."

I knew an early dev at DoorDash, and he hated that policy.

That said, I personally agree with that approach. It's the practical vs academic argument: the ideal is both. Anecdotally, the most productive dev on my team was hired from a customer of ours where he personally used and integrated with our software.

My son worked at Chipotle. The biggest problem with their system was inability to set a time-to-ready for online orders. Delivery time was set fixed to say half an hour, no feedback from the location. So in rush times there were a lot of unhappy customers, venting their unhappiness on personnel and - forget tips (during rush hour!).

If developers had experience at retail locations… strike that - if persons responsible for software purchases had experience at locations, this probably would have been avoided.

The article also does not mention communicating time-to-ready back as an issue. Or may be I’ve missed it - too many details already…

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