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Successful companies go blind

ianreppel.org

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Re: Successful companies go blind

#21

Post by anthuswilliams »

awestroke wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#23

Post by light_triad »

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.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#25

Post by codeduck »

elictronic wrote: post #12

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 cowo…

The system grows to stifle itself.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#28

Post by sandeepkd »

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.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#29

Post by trjordan »

oooyay wrote: post #17
trjordan wrote: post #4

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 re…

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…

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."

Re: Successful companies go blind

#30

Post by AnimalMuppet »

inigyou wrote: post #5
ActionHank wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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