I’m convinced nobody on the Google/Nest Home teams has ever used the product outside of testing in a VM.

Product managers are no longer about the users. They just want to have some "impact" and then they move onto another product.

Same when you know how the sausage is made.

My question is always if it’s just the company I’m at or is it how the who industry is run? The more companies I work at the more i realize it’s the later.

On the flip side, it’s easy to take for granted what DOES work when you know how much better it could be. I was siting at dinner with an 73 year old man yesterday who could stop talking about how amazing Siri is cause it’ll tell him the population of some country.

That is when you force yourself and eat your own produced dogfood to make sure it is good.

But when $$$ are rolling in anyway who cares enough?

This only goes so far, trying to use your own head as a simulation or approximation of user experience. Some of us will be building software for people who we will never be in our lifetime.