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 coworkers who lack that experience get shut down often before they even start.
If you are not in the chosen group or have a fully fledged business case with 5 levels of managerial approval it’s dead on arrival. To anyone in this sort of role it’s not blindness where you lose the skill, it’s stagnation. The moment you leave you move again. The blind fish never gets their eyes back.
The sighted engineer is also cave adapted, just to a different cave.
In truth, the phenomenon they're describing (very accurately might I add) doesn't lead to the company "going blind" - the company never had eyes to begin with. The company was incepted in the cave & has no need to apoptose an organ that never needed to exist: neither in the company in abstract nor in its "engineers who have never worked elsewhere [...] well-meaning people who do not suspect anything is off. They have only ever known the cave"
The apoptosis the article describes doesn't really affect the company per se - its a process only new joiners undergo, part of their subsumption into The Company. Or they resist & ultimately leave, reinforcing the concentration of blindness.
---
Or, if they don't either submit to apoptosis or leave the company, they do a secret third thing, possibly the most common reaction: they silo. That can lead to some rare gems emerging from otherwise stagnant companies but mostly leads instead to team isolation & further stagnation.
Everyone has the same group think, it bleeds into the way the LLM generates code and ultimately it just rots teams.
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.
Fun part, all the folks who created this bloat would run away and find a green pasture.
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.
That there are outliers in a big group of people is not a big idea.
The issue is that they're outliers while the rest are just there because that's how they earn food and shelter; get job is just how the world works types. Those outliers efforts and communication are then lost to ignorance of the majority who only think in terms of trying to repeat the past/maintain status quo they understand.
For example marketing cannot grok and figure out how to spin a new idea and instead convince management they're "the Photoshop company not whatever this is" to pick the on Adobe.
It's similar to political conservatism, a kind of social conservatism of its own.
If new thing fails they may be fired for bad messaging or glitchy features depending on their role. Feels safer to flog the same old horse too long and fall behind.
If you sat these same executives down in a one-on-one setting and went through a history of things they did and how they might've impacted people I think you'd probably discover some shame and embarrassment once they're removed from the incentive pool. That isn't to say they're bad, just to say that incentives are guides in the dark, and the inside of a massive corporate machina is full of tunnels.
also, hi TR :)
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."
In my experience the problem can be the lower level managers and ICs. If they cannot perform to the industry standard, technical debt will begin to compound, and it will be difficult to adapt. It’s also difficult to improve your standards when the competent people keep leaving, or don’t feel like they can make changes.
https://www.amazon.com/Uncoupling-Turning-Points-Intimate-Re...
If you are starting a new social media service, for instance, the N^2 dynamics are brutal and you have to work so hard to attract, onboard, and retain each precious user. A site that has momentum is practically impossible to kill and, barring a really enlightened form of benign neglect (Craigslist?), you will eventually go into a "harvesting" mode for either money or social impact.
I’m wary of essays that take a genuinely complicated organizational problem and explain it through one dominant lens. Life isn't that simple.
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.