Is an employee's use of his/her company's product outside of work considered dogfooding?

Question

Suppose I work at Microsoft. I would probably write the bulk of my code using Visual Studio, which is one of Microsoft's most popular projects. Therefore, dogfooding.

Now suppose I work at Netflix, which provides a video streaming service for entertainment value. I'm not going to watch House of Cards on the job (wink). I might when I get home, though. Can an employee's use of a company's product off the clock (e.g. entertainment software, tools for personal projects, etc.) be considered dogfooding?

Answer 1

No.

The term "dogfooding" is specifically reserved for a company using its own products, for testing and promotional ("we use our own stuff") purposes, not for casual use of those same products outside of work, even by employees.

The only scenario of that kind that I would consider dogfooding would be Netflix giving their employees free subscriptions in return for bug reports and telemetry. The company has to have some skin in the game, in other words.

In a testing scenario, you would want to be exercising the UI more than would happen when you're just passively watching House of Cards. Unless, of course, all you're testing is the stability of the video player.