Successful companies go blind
ianreppel.org
ianreppel.org
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.
I understand it can suck: but what is lacking isn't your technical demonstration (unless it is truly ground breaking), but your demonstration to clean up your own mess and be responsible.
The entire system there is old projects dropped by some new manager, retiree, or corpse. I work on systems that are older than I am and I was born in the 80s. There is no side in Ba Sing Sah.
You might want to get on top of that, and start advocating for neuro-auditing your assets, mr. project manager.
Inevitably they'd try to do a "rapid prototype" of a feature that had been tried a hundred times before and declared "too hard/unworkable/uninteresting." as they wouldn't talk to those who had done this before, or look at any past work... the invariable result was a project shut down within 6 months and the manager would be shown the door some time later.
The main takeaway from the above is to listen to people around you when you join an org, and observe the habits of successful leaders. Odds are good that at least within this particular org under these circumstances... those habits are the ones that work.
Most places I land there's deference to the status quo and those that came before. People assume that efforts of that past were well considered and that good work was done.
But ultimately when pressed, there's generally no evidence of the above, and when there is evidence, one can generally demonstrate the flaws in the approach, so I press on anyway and it hasn't really bitten me yet.
Of course, in many of these projects there's now deference to decisions I've made. Some of those decisions were well made, with evidence and supporting work, to make them challengeable should the understanding changes. Some of them are gut checks because they didn't matter to me at the time.
Either way the take away is good, but often practices exist simply to frustrate.
Skunkworks is a decent example of how this can work: you set up a subset of your larger company to operate more like a startup. But importantly this isolation both limits the risk to the company as a whole as well as isolating the subset from the bureaucracy of the larger organization.
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...
About "going blind" - note that the post describes some fish as never developing sight to begin with. It can be like that with developers, who have never known better, and most of their industry experience is at that very company. Or they come from another company with similar problems, or have switched from a different language they worked with elsewhere etc.
Fun part, all the folks who created this bloat would run away and find a green pasture.
The sighted engineer is also cave adapted, just to a different cave.
Simply recognizing the tradeoff exists, is likely to result in wiser decisions with lower tradeoff costs, and greater opportunity expansion.
this is also a wanring to young people joinging old companies in weak job positions over taking a chance on a new company trying to be better. dont just assume the old company is going to be there forever.
especially now in defense. war has changed. companies like Anduril are on the rise while classics like Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, etc are assessing how much they can adapt. its not extreme like theyll go out of business but the gov may order way less jets and such than in the past, and put a lot more money into drones. they will still buy jets though, and the classics may need to adapt to a lower funding pool, lower orders, and becoming a low volume legacy product hovering around certain use-cases, while new companies get all the runway to takeoff on the big investments.
this kind of thing plays out at all different scales and to different degrees everywhere in the market.
To not recognize the decisions, weigh their tradeoffs and their implications, is to make the decisions blindly.
Creativity has to be actively protected where it is wanted or impactful. Or in large companies, it will get crushed as power to make choices flows elsewhere.
Everyone has the same group think, it bleeds into the way the LLM generates code and ultimately it just rots teams.
I don’t think this is always true, however. It’s provably false, actually, because I can name at least one group of people that has done something unique and not sloppy. For example, the C8 Corvette is pretty sweet. So is Costco’s supply chain and employment practices. And I also think Pink Floyd’s music is pretty non-average.
Much of what goes on in corporate America is not blindness its accretion. They simply dont have the culture to evolve. The devotion to next quarters numbers and share holder value play a massive part in this.
I think this sums up the problems pointed out by the article, as well as most organizational problems in general.
When I was younger, I thought management was basically useless, do-nothing mucky mucks, who did more harm than good. This can still be true, but I've changed my opinion. Hiring and firing is hard. Creating a strong and healthy culture is hard. Defining success, and steering the ship to it is hard.
I think as long as money is the measurement of success, particularly from a short-term viewpoint, nothing can change. Public companies basically cannot evolve their form, because boards and shareholders will rarely agree to leave money on the table for an opaque long view that prioritizes culture over profit.
A big subset of these issues are American business culture.
> Public companies basically cannot evolve their form, because boards and shareholders will rarely agree to leave money on the table for an opaque long view that prioritizes culture over profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. makes a lot of this possible.
Other corporate structures are possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
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.
That there are outliers in a big group of people is not a big idea.
The issue is that they're outliers while the rest are just there because that's how they earn food and shelter; get job is just how the world works types. Those outliers efforts and communication are then lost to ignorance of the majority who only think in terms of trying to repeat the past/maintain status quo they understand.
For example marketing cannot grok and figure out how to spin a new idea and instead convince management they're "the Photoshop company not whatever this is" to pick the on Adobe.
It's similar to political conservatism, a kind of social conservatism of its own.
If new thing fails they may be fired for bad messaging or glitchy features depending on their role. Feels safer to flog the same old horse too long and fall behind.
If you sat these same executives down in a one-on-one setting and went through a history of things they did and how they might've impacted people I think you'd probably discover some shame and embarrassment once they're removed from the incentive pool. That isn't to say they're bad, just to say that incentives are guides in the dark, and the inside of a massive corporate machina is full of tunnels.
also, hi TR :)
I agree, though maybe the middle ground is something more like: the constraints of our environments shape us. It's easy to say that big companies are a weird and unique cave that produces weird and unique outcomes, but other companies are somehow constraint-free. Smart, talented founders do weird and constrained things all the time because they don't have capital or customer bases or brands, and those are also constraints that bind just as hard.
"Race for MVP to learn what your bottleneck is" is a handcuff, just like "you can't deploy more than 3x / year because our customer base hates change."
In my experience the problem can be the lower level managers and ICs. If they cannot perform to the industry standard, technical debt will begin to compound, and it will be difficult to adapt. It’s also difficult to improve your standards when the competent people keep leaving, or don’t feel like they can make changes.
I disagree, producing something valuable is common, and it’s common for scientists / inventors / artists / composers to die poor.
Selling, Capturing the value, and building businesses on top is hard.
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”
Contrast that with Facebook, where I later worked. Teams there were bolder and moved more quickly. I still had to collaborate with cross-functional partners, but it felt more collaborative — and we had much more autonomy as long as my team hit its goals each quarter.
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.
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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.
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.
I’m wary of essays that take a genuinely complicated organizational problem and explain it through one dominant lens. Life isn't that simple.
Companies that lose their leadership positions tend to focus only on incremental improvements. Such companies focus on optimizations: on cost reductions, product upgrades, short term stock price movements etc and less on the dynamic changes in customer needs.
This creates blind spots. This may be due to myopia, or perhaps inertia or misaligned organizational incentives.
Good news is, this inability evolve creates the opportunity for upstarts.
Circle of life..
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.
Worked for Forrest because the character was intended to be simple.
A cave isn't stable. It's an ever evolving biome of spores, molds, and fungus.
Seems like this can stated much more simply; as a company scales latency grows between nodes fostering information asymmetries. That growth in communication latency while paychecks still show up lead workers to believe stability exists, they down play lag effects, become less pro-active. Latency in productivity increases, company falls behind.
Signal attenuation is a physical constant as entropy erodes structure requiring more energy to maintain structure while employees put in less. Imo this is why our economy is fundamentally flawed. There's no rewriting physics no matter how much rhetoric relative to economics we conjure. Bizarre and outdated belief language is magic and we simply haven't found the right spell.
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.
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.