>What I learned was:

>• Almost nobody else in engineering did this.

>• I was considered weird for doing it.

>• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees.

>• An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic.

>• The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring

Sincerely, thank you for confirming my anecdotal but long-standing observations. My go-to joke about this is that Google employees are officially banned from even visiting user forums. Because otherwise, there is no other logical explanation why there are 10+ year old threads where users are reporting the same issue over and over again, etc.

Good engineering in big tech companies (I work for one, too) has evaporated and turned into Promotion Driven Development.

In my case: write shitty code, cut corners, accumulate tech debt, ship fast, get promo, move on.