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.
Successful companies go blind
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Re: Successful companies go blind
#52successful companies go blind because they spend so much time looking at dashboards they forget there's a windshield
Re: Successful companies go blind
#53[deleted]
Re: Successful companies go blind
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ar…
Yeah I agree with that. I'd also extend this to ICs, but the effect is probably less pronounced as those with much more consequential power.
Re: Successful companies go blind
#55The 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…
What is the motivation for this LLM generated text? Why create the account in the first place?
Re: Successful companies go blind
#56This 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”
Re: Successful companies go blind
#57> 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.
Re: Successful companies go blind
#58What the AI post
Re: Successful companies go blind
#59[flagged]
Re: Successful companies go blind
#60What the AI post
Holy slopfest Batman!