> I was young and realized only afterward...
If I could give young me any single piece of advice, it'd be "OMG STFU. Just smile and cash the check."
The CTO cofounder was not impressed by the UI guy asking out loud what every one was thinking.
The fancy pants UI I was tasked to create wasn't even backed by a query language or path expressions. So dumb.
I stayed just long enough to find another gig.
PS- I did storyboard and wireframed a novel UI which resolved the graph visualization "paradox" (aka "focus+context"). It'd be perfect for neo4j & Cypher. I always thought I'd eventually circle back, if only to see if the idea had legs. Oh well.
Eating one's own dog food was not part of the road map.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to everything, but that's definitely a smell for product-market fit.
Internally it never even crossed our minds to use it as a means of building the tools themselves. I remember bringing this up at one point during a company meeting and the CEO glowered at me like I was pointing out some inconstancy in religious theology. He spun some web of garbage about why it wasn't appropriate for our specific needs. I was young and realized only afterward that it was just not something you were supposed to mention there.
It was actually fun to work on for a while and we sold a lot of product, but it eventually dried up along with the rest of that part of the industry.