All successful startups are fighting a battle against entropy. And entropy is becoming indistinguishable from all the other companies out there. Which means losing what made them succeed in the first place.
This is why company culture is important. You need to know what your values are. And then you need to maintain them. Even at the cost of the wrong short-term profitable opportunities.
This reads more like some corporate-aimed PR than earnest words that left the mouth of a human
If you take bigger salary in exchange of defrauding people, say by denying insurance payment to people who should have it, you dont have "not defrauding" as a value.
The point that he was explaining when I saw the quote was why the hiring process at Zappos had a "culture fit" part of the interview process. Because you can't maintain a culture, if you have employees who aren't aligned on values. Maintaining this requires passing up on opportunities to hire people who will be productive, because you think that they will undermine the culture.
The importance of culture as a value to the organization is demonstrated by passing up on opportunities that would undermine it. Even if those opportunities are otherwise good.
And while you may consider corporate culture to be bullshit, others don't. Where others includes every entrepreneur who built a large company that I've ever seen speak on the subject.
I've been lucky enough to see good versus bad corporate cultures first hand. So I also fit into that other bucket. Though admittedly more looking at the issue from somewhere near the bottom, rather than the view from the top.
That aged well...
But that doesn't invalidate the importance of the principles on which Zappos succeeded under his leadership.
It is a mistake to dismiss key insights merely because they come from someone who had human flaws. We all have human flaws, and we all make mistakes.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...
> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
I suppose if I want to use the word to mean the original sense, I need to include clarification that that's what I'm doing. I'll have to think of how best to do that without coming across as judgy or condescending, since that's sort of police-y (and also just unpleasant).
Sorry about that. I realize this term has a very strict meaning in English, but it's a bit less true in my language (French).
I responded to this in another comment above, but basically I was using the term to encompass everything that contributes to degrading a product. Everything that makes it more complex, often tied to company growth (I started a company in 2012 that's now 700 people).
But I get the point. I see this touches on another topic around corporate malpractice. I honestly wasn't even aware of that.
Now I know :)
Froggies doing wrong cultural appropriation again... maybe the "Emilia Perez syndrome" is becoming a thing.
When you're building, adding yet another feature can sometimes shave off all the edges that made you successful in the first place.
Same with messaging. The more you try to sound universal, the less anyone hears you.
Strong opinions that are honestly held and communicated are such great signs of respect. It's refreshing to see: "This is who we are. If it's not for you, that's okay."
Good piece.
I wanted to read a new story; one about an internal debate where the easy answer was to "just do it," but a hard no is what actually saved everything.
Surely that story exists.
I connected it to simplicity and focus. In my head the link was clear, but I get that it's not as obvious when written :)
I'm using this blog as a kind of journal—short posts, quick thoughts. So I totally understand if it leaves you wanting more.
Honestly didn't expect this much traffic, my other posts have just been read by friends ^^
That is not what enshittification is about, and not who it is about. You don't enshittify to please users, you do it to please shareholders.
I was thinking more about all the factors that increase product complexity, and it's far from being just about shareholders:
* The more people you add to a company, the more complexity you add because inherently, everyone wants to leave their mark. In the end, some people see themselves grow because they contributed to this or that new feature. Doesn't matter if it's redundant. Doesn't matter if 10 months later you realize it adds nothing. I've unfortunately seen this pattern repeat itself over and over.
* The bigger a company gets, the more it needs to respond to increasingly specific use cases. A salesperson tells you their client needs this. Customer support tells you a portion of your users are asking for that. Either you have enough perspective to say it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't, and you try to please everyone. But it's a huge source of complexity. And I could cite tons of examples from my old company.
And just to be transparent, I am using my blog as a journal, with short posts. I was not expecting that much traffic and I totally understand that it's maybe not as deep as you would expect ^^
Of course he followed it up with a book, so there's that as well if you want a deeper dive, but the essay is fairly comprehensive at least in laying out what he intends by the term.
One is many products start out pleasing most users, but pivots to enterprise customers because of revenue. Thus, the product shifts heavily towards the enterprise use-case of a few customers at the loss of most small-medium users. Getting more users in this enterprise world means making changes to accommodate special needs and that leads to entropy.
Another new need is to hit next quarters revenue targets, so companies find more juice to squeeze somewhere.
Arguably it was a poor choice of word, but some of us would still like to be able to refer to that specific phenomenon.