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Successful companies go blind

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71–80 of 94 posts

Re: Successful companies go blind

#71

Post by nomel »

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…

Related, the craziest emergent behavior I see is non-technical managers killing projects because they themselves can't understand how it could be implemented. I firmly believe many managers think they're in the positions they are because they're technical, rather than managerial.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#72

Post by [deleted] »

elictronic wrote: post #50
kardianos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct. But have you been on the other side: something you know is not perfect, but someone convinces you to try something, you agree, it isn't great but it gets used... then they leave and you are stuck with something that is a pain clean up. 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…

I just told you I have run multiple projects through at a large defense contractor. The entire system there is old projects dropped by some new manager, retiree, or corpse. I work on systems that are older than I am and I was born in the 80s. There is no side in Ba Sing Sah.

[deleted]

Re: Successful companies go blind

#73

Post by d-cc »

elictronic wrote: post #50
kardianos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct. But have you been on the other side: something you know is not perfect, but someone convinces you to try something, you agree, it isn't great but it gets used... then they leave and you are stuck with something that is a pain clean up. 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…

I just told you I have run multiple projects through at a large defense contractor. The entire system there is old projects dropped by some new manager, retiree, or corpse. I work on systems that are older than I am and I was born in the 80s. There is no side in Ba Sing Sah.

Assuming you are working on anything of importance, there's a pretty good chance that you, and/or your coworkers, already have our interfaces installed in your organism. (as does most of NATO)

You might want to get on top of that, and start advocating for neuro-auditing your assets, mr. project manager.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#75

Post by hunterpayne »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #30
inigyou wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They were trained on the output of Reddit mostly. Its a miracle they even work at all given that.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#76

Post by hunterpayne »

bsenftner wrote: post #63
gmfawcett wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps just because it's not accurate. Reducing any complex system down to a trivial projection is very unlikely to explain anything well.

The essay is not a trivial projection, its an astute observation of people in systems that no longer have to work to maintain their status quo. All those wealthy people ruining Western Culture have it far too easy to understand what they are doing to the rest of all they set upon.

Yes, take a look at the idea of "luxury political beliefs" for depth into this idea.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#77

Post by zer00eyz »

chickensong wrote: post #65
zer00eyz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They simply dont have the culture to evolve. The devotion to next quarters numbers and share holder value play a massive part in this. I think this sums up the problems pointed out by the article, as well as most organizational problems in general. When I was younger, I thought management was basically useless, do-nothing mucky mucks, who did more harm than good. This can still be true, but I've changed my opinion.…

> Hiring and firing is hard. Creating a strong and healthy culture is hard. Defining success, and steering the ship to it is hard.

A big subset of these issues are American business culture.

> Public companies basically cannot evolve their form, because boards and shareholders will rarely agree to leave money on the table for an opaque long view that prioritizes culture over profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. makes a lot of this possible.

Other corporate structures are possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Re: Successful companies go blind

#78

Post by lumost »

kardianos wrote: post #38
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…

You're correct. But have you been on the other side: something you know is not perfect, but someone convinces you to try something, you agree, it isn't great but it gets used... then they leave and you are stuck with something that is a pain clean up. 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…

When I was in a large org, it was a common failure that a manager would come in from a smaller firm - and assume that our design practices etc. were meaningless overhead.

Inevitably they'd try to do a "rapid prototype" of a feature that had been tried a hundred times before and declared "too hard/unworkable/uninteresting." as they wouldn't talk to those who had done this before, or look at any past work... the invariable result was a project shut down within 6 months and the manager would be shown the door some time later.

The main takeaway from the above is to listen to people around you when you join an org, and observe the habits of successful leaders. Odds are good that at least within this particular org under these circumstances... those habits are the ones that work.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#79

Post by dparkmit »

This reminds me of my days at Intuit. In its earliest days, Intuit had excellent people and teams. But by the time I got there, it had gotten too comfortable being an industry leader without real competition. That led to matrix management: as a product manager, I reported to the product org but also needed approvals from so many cross-functional counterparts that we could barely get anything done. Over time, that comfort bled into a lower bar for hires.

Contrast that with Facebook, where I later worked. Teams there were bolder and moved more quickly. I still had to collaborate with cross-functional partners, but it felt more collaborative — and we had much more autonomy as long as my team hit its goals each quarter.

Re: Successful companies go blind

#80

Post by mrjivraj »

+1 The best companies succeed because they are able to adapt to changing business environments and more importantly, to changing customer needs.

Companies that lose their leadership positions tend to focus only on incremental improvements. Such companies focus on optimizations: on cost reductions, product upgrades, short term stock price movements etc and less on the dynamic changes in customer needs.

This creates blind spots. This may be due to myopia, or perhaps inertia or misaligned organizational incentives.

Good news is, this inability evolve creates the opportunity for upstarts.

Circle of life..

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