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...
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.
Fun part, all the folks who created this bloat would run away and find a green pasture.
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.
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.
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.
The sighted engineer is also cave adapted, just to a different cave.
Everyone has the same group think, it bleeds into the way the LLM generates code and ultimately it just rots teams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Simply recognizing the tradeoff exists, is likely to result in wiser decisions with lower tradeoff costs, and greater opportunity expansion.
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.
I’m wary of essays that take a genuinely complicated organizational problem and explain it through one dominant lens. Life isn't that simple.
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."
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.
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.
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.
The Mexican cavefish kept its eye genes for over a million years after the eyes themselves disappeared. Something similar happens to companies once they achieve success.
The Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus) exists in two forms only kilometres apart. In the rivers along the Sierra del Abra, the fish has eyes and behaves the way ordinary fish behave. In the limestone caves under the same mountains, members of the same species are blind, depigmented, and translucent. The genome is virtually identical.
Within hours of fertilization in cave conditions, the lens-building programme triggers early apoptosis (i.e. programmed cell death), and the energy that would have gone to optic tissue is redirected to traits the cave actually rewards: better olfaction, deeper feeding, and fat reserves against the next lean year. Sight is no longer expressed. The same fish, hatched in the river, would see.
Companies who have forgotten what it took to become successful are similar: they stop recognizing competence, because the environment has stopped expressing the trait in anyone the company hires. Call it competence blindness, which is different from incumbents who fail because they cling to the customers and margins of yesterday’s market. Firms with competence blindness do not disappear. In fact, they can survive for decades.
When a startup hits rapid growth, it hires at speed. Headcount targets bend the bar until the bar disappears altogether. Engineers who have never worked elsewhere learn the house style, and within a year find themselves on hiring panels. They select for comfort with the prevailing mess, because they have no other frame of reference. After a few cycles the company has a population of well-meaning people who do not suspect anything is off. They have only ever known the cave, and life inside the cave is good.
The view from outside is encouraging: strong brand, decent margins, headcount up. From within, the view is not so flattering. Build pipelines only the original author can run, deployments so fragile that they require a senior engineer to be on call at all times, and a wiki so out of date it might as well be written in hieroglyphics. Because the company’s numbers still look fine, leadership believes the foundations are sound.
In this climate, careful engineering becomes a vestigial trait: the capacity exists, but the expression has been suppressed by an environment that does not return the energy spent on it. An engineer who insists on expressing the trait is investing in an organ the cave will not feed. After the first round of overruled proposals, the apoptosis begins.
Arrive with sight and the problems are immediately visible. You propose something the wider industry has already moved past, and you are told the suggestion is over-engineered, academic, and not aligned with priorities. What you intended as overdue maintenance reads as an attack on the identity of the engineers who stapled together the existing infrastructure.
The response is predictable: the company assembles a centre of excellence. Due to the centre’s obsession with control, intrinsic motivation atrophies until the people doing the work feel that none of it is theirs anymore. In healthy companies, excellence is ambient and distributed. In cave dwellers, it is extracted into a process shop, charged with writing the standards, enforcing the templates, and running mandatory rituals. The centre is designed to suppress the very trait its name claims to cultivate.
When a market’s barriers to entry are prohibitive, incumbents can accumulate bureaucracy and tolerate waste, because no credible entrant forces discipline. The cave is geologically stable, so they do not need to grow new eyes. That is how self-proclaimed technology companies end up sounding like the tech giants on the conference stage yet ship like regional utilities from the nineties.
Brand and cash still attract a steady supply of sighted engineers. They arrive, realize the place is running on stored fat from earlier seasons, and feel their skills regressing in the dark. Some leave within a year, for they refuse to go blind. Management explains the exits in terms of generational fickleness, culture fit, the labour market, anything but the obvious.
The ones who stay are comfortable. The work is predictable, the salary adequate, the internal game familiar, and the politics rewarding to whoever learns to play the game. Over time the comfort switches off their sight. What remains is fluency in cave rules and a steadily diminishing ability to imagine themselves outside.
The conventional story about smart people in dysfunctional companies treats staying as acquiescence. Hirschman gave us three options (exit, voice, loyalty), and they remain accurate. The cavefish analogy adds a fourth: the people who stay adapt to the cave’s pressures, mostly outside their awareness, until the adaptation is indistinguishable from loyalty. Staying is apoptosis.
The Mexican cavefish has not lost its eye genes in any definitive sense. Nearby surface populations still see perfectly well. What switches sight back on is the next water the fish swims into. Swim elsewhere, and your sight may return.