How Successful Companies Go Blind: The Danger of Competence Blindness
I compare successful companies to Mexican cavefish that lose their sight in dark environments. When firms grow rapidly, they often stop recognizing true competence, creating a culture where careful engineering becomes a vestigial trait. Instead of adapting, these organizations build bureaucratic centers of excellence that suppress innovation, causing talented engineers to either leave or slowly go blind themselves.
Staying is apoptosis.
- elictronic
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 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.
- jordand
I'm currently in a 'successful company goes blind' situation myself. The company has grown massively and the situation we're stuck in is mainly driven by two types of 'internal' people:
a) People who've spent 10+ years with the company, and ended up in management/C-level positions - these are people that have:
- Been promoted over and over from entry/mid positions across a chain of smaller easier-to-deliver projects
- Have not upskilled or gained real experience on anything large/complex/challenging
- Have a very safe, very cozy job, with no perspective or understanding on anything other than their past 10+ years.
b) Technical Leads/directors who've spent ~8+ years within the company, where:
- They have a solid track record of success, a good reputation, and built up a lot of trust with the company...across a chain of smaller easier-to-deliver projects.
- From their earned track record, they have very little oversight and accountability (management doesn't think they need it)
- Limited/no interest in upskilling
- Decision making is mostly on them...and the decisions made are orientated around themselves (!)
- Limited/no interest in listening to others perspectives...even to the new highly-experienced management that's brought in to oversee them (why should they? They're the chosen! They're seen as perfect!)
You can see right between them how the blindness forms. Now, guess what happens when a client decides that a small project...is actually going to be a much, much bigger p […]
- overgard
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.
- 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.
- 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.