Successful Companies Go Blind

sspeckx about 3 hours ago 20 commentsRead Article on ianreppel.org

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elictronic•about 1 hour 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.

rafterydj•30 minutes ago

This is frankly one of my worst fears.

ozgur44•about 1 hour ago

wondering if i can run something by you

light_triad•8 minutes 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.

ActionHank•about 2 hours 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.

zer00eyz•about 1 hour 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.

inigyou•about 2 hours 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.

terminalbraid•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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?

trjordan•about 2 hours 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.

browski•about 1 hour 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.

oooyay•about 1 hour 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 :)

dj_gitmo•about 1 hour ago

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.

karahime•about 1 hour 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.

PaulHoule•about 1 hour 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.

greenoracle9•about 1 hour ago

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

awestroke•about 1 hour 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.

anthuswilliams•12 minutes 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.

malfist•about 1 hour ago

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

bsenftner•about 1 hour ago

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