AI software company Graphite says it practices 'dogfooding' and 'onboarding roulette' by deleting employee accounts at random
I thought I'd heard every bit of corpo-speak going at this point in my career, but apparently I was wrong. AI code review platform Graphite has published a blog detailing its use of "dogfooding" to help develop its onboarding process, a particularly ugly term that apparently equates to "being forced to eat your own dogfood".
Essentially, you make the product, you should be forced to use it—which Graphite apparently enacts by randomly deleting employee accounts on a daily basis, a process it refers to as "onboarding roulette".
The facepalms, they are not big enough. Anyway, the whole idea is to test the onboarding process for its AI code review software, a traditionally difficult problem to solve due to the userbase being your primary test subjects. Fear not, however, as apparently dogfooding is the way forward. As co-founder and CTO Greg Foster explains:
"Our solution at Graphite has been to run a roulette script, randomly deleting one of our engineers' Graphite accounts every day at 9 a.m. We don’t just reset onboarding—we delete their account, tokens, configured filters, uploaded gifs, and more."
"Isn't that frustrating? Sure." continues Foster. "Folks on our team come to work to code new features, not to find themselves logged out and forced to recreate their accounts from scratch. We were cautious when first trying the technique, but the benefits became clear immediately."
I presume those benefits don't include members of your team immediately searching for a new job when they realise they were screwed with deliberately, but still. Foster seems remarkably chipper about the whole affair, continuing:
"Like most products, Graphite aims for fast, bug-free, and painless onboarding. The best way for us to ensure this is to suffer through onboarding once every day ourselves. Across our full Eng-product-design team, any individual only gets deleted once a month on average. But one teammate a day hitting a sharp edge has proven enough to find and motivate fixing issues.
"Deleting employee accounts has created dogfooding on one of our most critical and hard to test surfaces. We’ve caught tens of bugs, and created user empathy in a traditional blindspot. I’d strongly recommend other product teams consider automatically deleting employee accounts for the same benefits."
Somehow I don't see "onboarding roulette" catching on, despite the supposed benefits. I can only imagine the emails I'd send if my job deliberately kicked me out of the platform I was building for the sake of testing, although I'd guess that some choice language would be involved. And as for "dogfooding?" I'll leave the Pedigree Chum to the pooches, thanks.