[dogles]

This was very well written. Effective communication with people is far more challenging (and rewarding) than the communication with devices that we developers do on a day to day basis. It’s easy to get lost in that cloud, and lose touch with the people we’re building for.

In startups, this aspect can too quickly get shunted off to a QA or CS personnel, and problems get abstracted into incident tickets (that are often ignored in favor of the Next Big Feature). That seems to me to be giving up one of the classic fundamental advantages of a small business: the personal touch.