You inserted the word "random" into the OP's statement in order to support your position. Your employees will ALWAYS have a better understanding of the state of affairs of projects they are developing, simply because they are the ones developing them. You cannot fully understand the complexities without doing the work yourself. Not factoring opinions about a product from the employees who are making it is incredibly irresponsible, and makes those employees much more likely to find an employer who will value them as subject matter experts.

>Not factoring opinions about a product from the employees who are making it is incredibly irresponsible, and makes those employees much more likely to find an employer who will value them as subject matter experts.

A developer is not a subject matter expert on how to market a product. Maybe you can restate your opinion.

Counter to your statement, "A developer is not a subject matter expert on how to market a product":

Most development experience I have had (open source, exclusively) comes with continual interaction with, and and feedback from, a subset of users who use the software. This subset is populated mostly by power users, those who rely on the software for work, and those who use it regularly. They are the ones who understand which needs the software is meeting and which it is failing to meet, and who ask for intelligent and sensible features to be added.

The marketing departments don't have this built in compass. They create ideas that they think will be profitable to the company, and they simply don't have the necessary connection with the users and with the software to know which of these ideas will be perceived as awful by the user.

The ones creating the software are the subject matter experts on what that software should do, how it should behave, and what the users will find most useful, in this instance.

The marketers are subject matter experts on... Other stuff? Advertisements and buzzwords and increasing revenues by targeting certain demographics of peoples? I have experience with the marketing side of business that has perhaps reflected poorly on that profession, so I'd love to hear from anyone that can fill my knowledge gap.

> Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it,

He's suggesting that the most simple, stupid check one could think of (polling random employees) would already have shown this to be a terrible idea. They didn't even go that far. That is indeed a bad sign.

>would already have shown this to be a terrible idea.

What are you basing this on?

I'm just a FF user, and I don't think it was a terrible idea, even though I personally wouldn't have gone that route.

Plenty of companies conduct internal beta's. Plenty of companies conduct internal usability studies for new features or anything in their product they have the slightest worry could backfire. I mean they could have included this in the developer unpublished version for some time and just asked for general feedback before releasing it. These concepts are far from unheard of.

>These concepts are far from unheard of.

Sure, and not doing any of that isn't a "terrible sign" as the OP claimed. Which is the point I'm countering.

Joel Test step 12 is more or less "grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of what you're working on".

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

>Joel Test step 12 is more or less

That's brilliant!

"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the new developer you hired" - HR

"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the fan choice for the new cafeteria's HVAC system " - Building Management

"grab random people in your hallway and see if they approve of the calculations in the spreadsheets that the company CFO produced". - Finance department.

Hey, I think you're on to something here. We could eliminate entire departments here ! :)

Hmm, when you remove the expensive "we should hire a management consultant to tell us to ask employees about the new dev" it almost seems laughable, like people wouldn't trust or want a kind of 'democracy' and would prefer and respect 'dictates handed down from above'.

Maybe it needs to cost $100k for someone in a suit to say "ask your employees, make use of their knowledge" before it sounds respectable?

its not polling for running the company, its a disaster check. If most of your employees hate the idea, it should be a sign of something wrong because I would expect Mozillians to be also users of Firefox.