5 ms·

Successful companies go blind

• measurablefunc 4mo ago
  Analogy doesn't really work.
• hailports 4mo 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_ 4mo ago
    What is the motivation for this LLM generated text? Why create the account in the first place?
• ActionHank 4mo 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.
  • inigyou 4mo 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 4mo ago
      And, in fact, corporations are why AIs produce what they do - because they were trained on the output of corporations.
      • hunterpayne 4mo ago
        They were trained on the output of Reddit mostly. Its a miracle they even work at all given that.
    • edot 4mo 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.
      • jurgenburgen 4mo ago
        If every member of a group is above average then the output would also be above average?
  • zer00eyz 4mo 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.
• trjordan 4mo 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 4mo 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.
  • browski 4mo 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.
• awestroke 4mo 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 4mo ago
    For every complex and difficult problem with tons of nuance, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution
  • anthuswilliams 4mo 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 4mo ago
  Success makes the old playbook feel safer than it really is.
• terminalbraid 4mo 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 4mo 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?
  • inigyou 4mo 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?
• bsenftner 4mo ago
  Now apply this to entire industries and entire countries, and we begin to see what is happening to all of Western Culture.
  • inigyou 4mo 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.
    • gmfawcett 4mo 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.
      • bsenftner 4mo ago
        The essay is not a trivial projection, its an astute observation of people in systems that no longer have to work to maintain their status quo. All those wealthy people ruining Western Culture have it far too easy to understand what they are doing to the rest of all they set upon.
        • hunterpayne 4mo ago
          Yes, take a look at the idea of "luxury political beliefs" for depth into this idea.
          • bsenftner 4mo ago
            That's not the same at all. Folding "luxury political beliefs" into this is politicizing the idea when that is not necessary. It's a slur.
        • gmfawcett 4mo ago
          I wasn't criticizing the essay. I was criticizing your suggestion that a narrow concept like "competence blindness" can explain the behaviour of a system as broad and immensely complicated as "all of Western Culture."
• elictronic 4mo 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 4mo ago
    wondering if i can run something by you
  • rafterydj 4mo ago
    This is frankly one of my worst fears.
  • codeduck 4mo ago
    The system grows to stifle itself.
    • inigyou 4mo ago
      The system is not stifling the system. It is stifling innovation.
  • returnInfinity 4mo ago
    Exactly, you need to be in the chosen group. The trusted group.
  • kardianos 4mo 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.
• PaulHoule 4mo 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-Relationships/dp/0679730028/ 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.
  • cindyllm 4mo ago
    [dead]
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• light_triad 4mo 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.
  • Nevermark 4mo 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 4mo 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.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• sandeepkd 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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...
  • einpoklum 4mo ago
    HN syntax is not like markdown unfortunately... your lists are all messed up :-(
• tbhimlying 4mo 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 4mo ago
    I hated that
• miohtama 4mo ago
  Schumpeter's creative destruction fixes this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
  • g8oz 4mo ago
    Without antitrust enforcement, creative destruction works a lot more poorly than it should.
• nostrademons 4mo ago
  Steve Jobs has a classic interview where he addressed this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1WrHH-WtaA
  • r0b05 4mo ago
    Relevant and well explained.
• overgard 4mo 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.
  • einpoklum 4mo 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 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• gumby 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
  What the AI post
  • masfuerte 4mo ago
    Holy slopfest Batman!
• aioproductos 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• thedreammachine 4mo ago
  Which large companies seem best at trying to avoid this? Apple, Airbnb, Box?
• orphereus 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo ago
  This is basically the entire reason the field of consulting exists.
• mandrade2 4mo ago
  great post man
• dparkmit 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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.
• browski 4mo 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.