this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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Programming
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Sometimes you have to.
Sometimes the intended user of a piece of software is not going to be a software engineer. The user might be intelligent, but not necessarily technically minded. They have no idea what's possible - and importantly, what isn't - and the software engineer closest to the subject may still not have a deep understanding of the subject, the nuances, the criteria for which the system is being written.
This is often unavoidable.
Even within the scope of the article, which seems to be about software projects for software engineers by software engineers, no group of engineers, nay, no two engineers, will have the same understanding of the field for which the software is being written.
Worse, management (at both ends) may well ensure that the only method of communication between developers and users is through them, providing a game of "telephone" in the middle.
This is all about the phrase "if you want a job done properly, do it yourself" and what you do if you can't.
And also the tree-swing cartoons that have been around for decades at this point.
I don't think the article means dogfooding. I think they mean that you can't design a system unless you're intimately involved with coding it.
And of course that's still wrong. It happens all the time. And things end up working out the majority of the time.