Successful Companies Go Blind

hailports

The cavefish framing generalizes past hiring. Any feedback loop that scores itself on a signal it also produces will go blind the same way — not because anyone stopped caring, but because the environment stopped punishing the failure. A concrete version I ran into recently: a collector appended one row per item per sweep to a metrics log. Views were a cumulative counter, so every row was a snapshot, not an event. The consumer that scored items summed the matching rows, so an item's reported reach got multiplied by the number of times it had been measured. Inflation scaled with age. The oldest items looked the most spectacular, and the loop concluded its strategy was working and did more of it. What kept it alive wasn't sloppiness. Every check passed. The file parsed, the counters grew monotonically, which is what healthy engagement looks like, and a spot check on a fresh item reported correctly because a fresh item has exactly one snapshot. The bug only existed in history. Nothing inside the loop could see it; the number that finally contradicted it came from the platform's own public API. Which I think is the sharper version of the cavefish point. The eye isn't lost because it's expensive to maintain. It's lost because nothing in the cave ever contradicts the fish.

ActionHank

From what I've seen, LLMs just accelerate or compound this whole process as well. Everyone has the same group think, it bleeds into the way the LLM generates code and ultimately it just rots teams.

trjordan

Most startups fail. Most big company projects are kind of worthless. These are two sides of the same coin. Producing something novel and valuable is HARD. Unbelievably hard. The idea is hard. The building is harder. The scaling and steering and feedback is ego-crushingly hard. When it's valuable, it's frequently enormously valuable. That funds the experimentation, the incremental expansion, the waste. It's hard to really internalize how valuable localization, admin controls, FedRAMP, and onboarding tweaks are, truly, because they all compound. You can't just have the idea and the MVP, you also have to have all the other stuff, and it's hard to come up with new ideas while you're trying to keep a million users happy. I vehemently disagree that people working at big companies are stupid, or making themselves stupid. There are VPs and SVPs at Adobe and Salesforce that are smarter, more knowledgable, and more productive than any startup employee. It's just structurally hard to move the needle there, and their successes aren't written about in TechCrunch. They're also paid a million dollars a year, and are unbothered by the lack of external recognition. I'm off founding a startup now, and it's good for the soul, but I don't delude myself into thinking everybody else is blind.

awestroke

The article starts with a pretty weak simile and is structured in a way that reminds me of llm output. Made me stop reading pretty quickly. I’m wary of essays that take a genuinely complicated organizational problem and explain it through one dominant lens. Life isn't that simple.

greenoracle9

Success makes the old playbook feel safer than it really is.

terminalbraid

Can we stop the "drop how at the start of a title" auto editing? I suspect this was to fix some flood of problems long ago, but every time I encounter it it modifies the title away from true intent of the author.

bsenftner

Now apply this to entire industries and entire countries, and we begin to see what is happening to all of Western Culture.

elictronic

Currently working at an older style defense company and this fits but I think momentum is a better reference. There are no financial incentives to risk on new process. Gatekeepers, siloing, bureaucracy, and risk aversion act to stop and slow. I have worked startups and early stage companies prior and used that experience to force developmental projects and gotten prototypes and patents through the resistance. My coworkers who lack that experience get shut down often before they even start. If you are not in the chosen group or have a fully fledged business case with 5 levels of managerial approval it’s dead on arrival. To anyone in this sort of role it’s not blindness where you lose the skill, it’s stagnation. The moment you leave you move again. The blind fish never gets their eyes back.

PaulHoule

In a lot of cases it is deliberate and not something that "just happens". See enshitification or Instagram or what can happen in a marriage, say https://www.amazon.com/Uncoupling-Turning-Points-Intimate-Re... If you are starting a new social media service, for instance, the N^2 dynamics are brutal and you have to work so hard to attract, onboard, and retain each precious user. A site that has momentum is practically impossible to kill and, barring a really enlightened form of benign neglect (Craigslist?), you will eventually go into a "harvesting" mode for either money or social impact.

light_triad

A good example of "founder bias" where big companies are read as not innovating, when in fact their goal is to squeeze as much juice from their user base and strengthen their monopolistic position and pricing power. From the outside it looks like blindness and atrophy but from the inside it's the main bread and butter. The sighted engineer is also cave adapted, just to a different cave.

sandeepkd

Most of the companies built with VC money in a MVP style fit in the criteria. The more I think about it, I feel at this point its more about the focus on business problem being solved than engineering (how its solved) which leads to this. The expectation around quality/completeness has degraded heavily lately and somewhere down the line this bloat is going to keep increasing the maintenance cost. Fun part, all the folks who created this bloat would run away and find a green pasture.

lucideer

This is a generally great article with a lot of truths, but the title & overarching narrative throughout is a little off & feels like the author is trying to shoehorn one story into another. In truth, the phenomenon they're describing (very accurately might I add) doesn't lead to the company "going blind" - the company never had eyes to begin with. The company was incepted in the cave & has no need to apoptose an organ that never needed to exist: neither in the company in abstract nor in its "engineers who have never worked elsewhere [...] well-meaning people who do not suspect anything is off. They have only ever known the cave" The apoptosis the article describes doesn't really affect the company per se - its a process only new joiners undergo, part of their subsumption into The Company. Or they resist & ultimately leave, reinforcing the concentration of blindness. --- Or, if they don't either submit to apoptosis or leave the company, they do a secret third thing, possibly the most common reaction: they silo. That can lead to some rare gems emerging from otherwise stagnant companies but mostly leads instead to team isolation & further stagnation.

jordand

I'm currently in a 'successful company goes blind' situation myself. The company has grown massively and the situation we're stuck in is mainly driven by two types of 'internal' people: a) People who've spent 10+ years with the company, and ended up in management/C-level positions - these are people that have: - Been promoted over and over from entry/mid positions across a chain of smaller easier-to-deliver projects - Have not upskilled or gained real experience on anything large/complex/challenging - Have a very safe, very cozy job, with no perspective or understanding on anything other than their past 10+ years. b) Technical Leads/directors who've spent ~8+ years within the company, where: - They have a solid track record of success, a good reputation, and built up a lot of trust with the company...across a chain of smaller easier-to-deliver projects. - From their earned track record, they have very little oversight and accountability (management doesn't think they need it) - Limited/no interest in upskilling - Decision making is mostly on them...and the decisions made are orientated around themselves (!) - Limited/no interest in listening to others perspectives...even to the new highly-experienced management that's brought in to oversee them (why should they? They're the chosen! They're seen as perfect!) You can see right between them how the blindness forms. Now, guess what happens when a client decides that a small project...is actually going to be a much, much bigger project, with real complexity, challenging external client people to work with, and a large number of external hires necessitated. Purely reactive decision making, several people that are a SPOF if they leave, no proactive planning or strategy now or before...and then things start breaking down...

tbhimlying

The only way to reach light speed is to become light itself. As an object with mass accelerates closer to the speed of light, its relativistic mass effectively increases, requiring exponentially more energy for further acceleration. To reach exactly the speed of light, an infinite amount of energy would be needed, which is physically impossible. The only way to actually reach the full potential of light speed is to convert all mass into pure energy, becoming light itself. They aren't going blind at all, but becoming the image you see - moving so purely along a market vector that there's no discernible drag, no expenditure, no profit - massless and infinite - vertices in the greater economic hologram. And if you can't see that, then you're not just blind but utterly rasterized.

miohtama

Schumpeter's creative destruction fixes this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

nostrademons

Steve Jobs has a classic interview where he addressed this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA

overgard

I'm not sure I'd call this a competence issue; it's more of a context issue. If you put talented people in a thick bureaucracy they cease being able to display those talents. I wouldn't view people working in a corporate bureaucracy as having "gone blind" and lost their competence necessarily (especially in this job market). It's like when a hockey team trades a player and suddenly the player doubles their output, because it was a bad system/skill fit/etc, they didn't magically become more talented on the new team, and they hadn't lost their talent on the previous team, they just needed the right system for the talent to show through.

luciana1u

successful companies go blind because they spend so much time looking at dashboards they forget there's a windshield

gumby

This is an internal form of the problem described in The Innovator’s Dilemma*: you optimize for what seems to work well and miss the big picture. I thinkers a natural Hayflick limit for companies. * you know: one of the 4 or 5 business books actually worth reading, that caused thousands of companies to start cargo-culting the word “innovation”

CobrastanJorji

> They select for comfort with the prevailing mess, because they have no other frame of reference. This doesn't go far enough. Employees on hiring committees select for conformance with their peers on the hiring committee because conformance with the other hiring committee members is the only success signal they will ever receive. An interviewer at a sufficiently large company will never receive any feedback (let alone timely feedback) on whether they are choosing good or bad coworker candidates. They will only ever get feedback on how other interviewers vote. In such an environment, the best you can learn to do is to conform. In a small startup, where you immediately begin to work with the person you chose, you will get a lot more feedback on the people you chose to hire. Even then, though, you will never get any feedback on your false negatives. Are you rejecting lots of good candidates? You'll never know.