Successful companies go blind
ianreppel.org
Successful companies go blind
1–10 of 94 posts
Re: Successful companies go blind
#2The 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.
Re: Successful companies go blind
#3From 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.
Re: Successful companies go blind
#4Most 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.
Re: Successful companies go blind
#5From 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.
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.
Re: Successful companies go blind
#6The 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.
Re: Successful companies go blind
#7Most 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 re…
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.
Re: Successful companies go blind
#8Success makes the old playbook feel safer than it really is.
Re: Successful companies go blind
#9The 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.
For every complex and difficult problem with tons of nuance, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution
Re: Successful companies go blind
#10Can 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.