Successful companies go blind

https://ianreppel.org/how-successful-companies-go-blind/

by speckx • 12 days ago

247 85 12 days ago

hailports• 12 days ago

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.

the_sleaze_• 12 days ago

What is the motivation for this LLM generated text? Why create the account in the first place?

ActionHank• 12 days ago

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.

inigyou4• 12 days ago

Corporations were the original AIs. They were slower, a bit less predictable, but they were superhuman intelligence disciplined to produce only the most bland depersonalised slop at all times.

AnimalMuppet• 12 days ago

And, in fact, corporations are why AIs produce what they do - because they were trained on the output of corporations.

edot• 12 days ago

Interesting take. I assume that, because corporations are a subset of “groups of people” that this applies to any group? The theory here being that, in the same way that LLMs produce the average of everything they’ve trained on, a group of people produces the average of every individual’s ideas and efforts (subject to things like some people having more power than others, etc.)?

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.

zer00eyz2• 12 days ago

I do consulting, I see lots of teams using LLM's to "speed run to a legacy code base".

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.

chickensong• 12 days ago

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.

trjordan2• 12 days ago

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.

karahime• 12 days ago

I agree with this, and would add that it's hard in part because it's always been hard, and people have overcome. I can only imagine the difficulty of coming up with something like HTTP, or a suspension bridge, or algebra, without the mental scaffolding already being there. If you go back and read the original discussions of these, they include a ton of what seems like circuitous explanation for what we take for granted as "simple" ideas, but which are absolutely not simple at all if you have to pull them from the primordial void sight unseen.

browski2• 12 days ago

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.

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.

oooyay2• 12 days ago

The individual executives I think are smart and I don't think the post discounts that; maybe "blind" is a distracting analogy. What the post draws into question, which I think is relatively common, is how a persons immediate incentives might intrinsically change a person. For instance, a very smart Adobe executive may start to pin engineers against each other to produce better results because they can and it produces results. They may begin to over-reward the few in search of inspiring the many. They may take fewer bets on the future because the status quo is just fine. All things that I think you as a start up founder would not do because you have immediate feedback mechanisms and consequences that signal that could lead to the end of your startup.

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 :)

trjordan2• 12 days ago

lmao hi Matt

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."

dj_gitmo• 12 days ago

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.

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.

ClumsyPilot• 12 days ago

Producing something novel and valuable is HARD

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.

awestroke• 12 days ago

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.

malfist• 12 days ago

For every complex and difficult problem with tons of nuance, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution

anthuswilliams• 12 days ago

It's better to read such essays as fables rather than comprehensive world models. It causes you to look at social and organizational structures in a new and (putatively) helpful way. It should be complementary to the rest of the frameworks with which you evaluate the world.

greenoracle9• 12 days ago

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

terminalbraid• 12 days ago

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.

gdulli• 12 days ago

What could be more representative of this community than the hubris of believing a simple algorithmic change could fix something that's actually deceptively complex and better off living with?

inigyou4• 12 days ago

It was intended to change "How I did X" to "I did X" I think but could we filter it to "How I" instead?

bsenftner3• 12 days ago

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

inigyou4• 12 days ago

You got downvoted for speaking the truth, or maybe because "Western culture" is such a vague term, but it works the way I read it.

gmfawcett2• 12 days ago

Or perhaps just because it's not accurate. Reducing any complex system down to a trivial projection is very unlikely to explain anything well.

elictronic2• 12 days ago

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.

ozgur44• 12 days ago

wondering if i can run something by you

rafterydj• 12 days ago

This is frankly one of my worst fears.

codeduck• 12 days ago

The system grows to stifle itself.

inigyou4• 12 days ago

The system is not stifling the system. It is stifling innovation.

returnInfinity• 12 days ago

Exactly, you need to be in the chosen group. The trusted group.

kardianos• 12 days ago

You're correct. But have you been on the other side: something you know is not perfect, but someone convinces you to try something, you agree, it isn't great but it gets used... then they leave and you are stuck with something that is a pain clean up.

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.

dbish• 12 days ago

Yes and it’s still always better to try new things then wait for approval or something to be perfect if you want the company to keep innovating.

elictronic2• 12 days ago

I just told you I have run multiple projects through at a large defense contractor.

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.

lumost• 12 days ago

When I was in a large org, it was a common failure that a manager would come in from a smaller firm - and assume that our design practices etc. were meaningless overhead.

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.

bengale• 12 days ago

A company at a certain point moves from “make it work” to “don’t break it”. Both have good reasons to be honest but “don’t break it” has far more restrictions.

ronfriedhaber2• 12 days ago

Perhaps what separates the good companies from the Great companies is that the latter always tries to make it works, doesn't rest on it's laurels, and takes any bet which is +ev.

WalterBright• 12 days ago

Now consider what happens with a government agency!

nomel• 12 days ago

Related, the craziest emergent behavior I see is non-technical managers killing projects because they themselves can't understand how it could be implemented. I firmly believe many managers think they're in the positions they are because they're technical, rather than managerial.

LtWorf• 12 days ago

Not like startups where every meme that the architect read on some blog must be used in production are better.

PaulHoule• 12 days ago

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• 12 days ago

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.

Nevermark2• 12 days ago

The problem is when practices are chosen, that improve things on one dimension, and harm things on another, without recognition of the long-term tradeoff being made.

Simply recognizing the tradeoff exists, is likely to result in wiser decisions with lower tradeoff costs, and greater opportunity expansion.

order-matters• 12 days ago

who is to recognize the tradeoff? communicate it to who? A giant business is built on stability. i dont think its a bad thing that they do not pivot except in circumstances where they have no other choice. The business is a brand and that brand is a certain way of doing things and if/when that way of doing things falls out of favor then the business should fail. the owners made enough to retire by then, as well as many additional people, and its a reasonable way for people to become unemployed which doesnt hurt their chances at new jobs. A new company sprouts up, or 5 new ones, and they can all be lean and quick to pivot and try to figure out the whole new way to do the same kind of business. All the experts can be hired and the supply chain keeps chugging along

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.

worldthruword• 11 days ago

Reminds me of a blogpost about discussions within facebook about supreme importance given to engagement metrics. Then they were replaced with holistic engagement metrics.

sandeepkd• 12 days ago

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• 12 days ago

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• 12 days ago

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...

einpoklum2• 10 days ago

HN syntax is not like markdown unfortunately... your lists are all messed up :-(

tbhimlying• 12 days ago

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.

pgisapedo• 12 days ago

I hated that

miohtama• 12 days ago

Schumpeter's creative destruction fixes this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

g8oz• 11 days ago

Without antitrust enforcement, creative destruction works a lot more poorly than it should.

nostrademons• 12 days ago

Steve Jobs has a classic interview where he addressed this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA

r0b05• 12 days ago

Relevant and well explained.

overgard• 12 days ago

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.

einpoklum2• 10 days ago

Even without the bureaucracy - it can be other developers themselves who shoot down suggestions for improvement or radical rethinking.

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.

luciana1u• 12 days ago

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

gumby• 12 days ago

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• 12 days ago

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.

gnarlouse• 12 days ago

What the AI post

masfuerte• 12 days ago

Holy slopfest Batman!

thedreammachine• 12 days ago

Which large companies seem best at trying to avoid this? Apple, Airbnb, Box?

orphereus• 12 days ago

I don't understand the analogy with the Mexican cavefish. They don't have eyes because they don't need them, and companies don't hire competent people because they don't need them? Is that the take?

secondcupofchai• 12 days ago

Cave is geologically stable is an interesting thought worth digging more on this behaviour, which is seen and felt, but it is a typical ignore as a boiling water syndrome.

Arubis• 12 days ago

This is basically the entire reason the field of consulting exists.

mandrade2• 12 days ago

great post man

measurablefunc• 12 days ago

Analogy doesn't really work.

dparkmit• 12 days ago

This reminds me of my days at Intuit. In its earliest days, Intuit had excellent people and teams. But by the time I got there, it had gotten too comfortable being an industry leader without real competition. That led to matrix management: as a product manager, I reported to the product org but also needed approvals from so many cross-functional counterparts that we could barely get anything done. Over time, that comfort bled into a lower bar for hires.

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.

mrjivraj• 12 days ago

+1 The best companies succeed because they are able to adapt to changing business environments and more importantly, to changing customer needs.

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..

locallost• 12 days ago

I disagree with the analogy, where the fish can develop eyes again and see, if placed in another environment because the genes are still there. I don't think that companies that went blind have genes anymore. It's debatable if they ever had them or if their success was based as much as being in the right place at the right time. If the times change, the successful way may no longer be successful. What is the dog and what is the tail? But more simply, in the end you need good people because in the end the work needs to be done well. In that case the genes might be physically gone because those people moved on to other companies.

browski2• 11 days ago

Creative writing has gone from Shakespeare and Poe to corny simile; "life is like a belly button."

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.

Successful companies go blind

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