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.
Most startups fail. Most big company projects are kind of worthless. These are two sides of the same coin.
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.
I agree with this, and would add that it's hard in part because it's always been hard, and people have overcome. I can only imagine the difficulty of coming up with something like HTTP, or a suspension bridge, or algebra, without the mental scaffolding already being there. If you go back and read the original discussions of these, they include a ton of what seems like circuitous explanation for what we take for granted as "simple" ideas, but which are absolutely not simple at all if you have to pull them from the primordial void sight unseen.
From what I've seen, LLMs just accelerate or compound this whole process as well.
Everyone has the same group think, it bleeds into the way the LLM generates code and ultimately it just rots teams.
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.
Can we stop the "drop how at the start of a title" auto editing? I suspect this was to fix some flood of problems long ago, but every time I encounter it it modifies the title away from true intent of the author.
The article starts with a pretty weak simile and is structured in a way that reminds me of llm output. Made me stop reading pretty quickly.
I’m wary of essays that take a genuinely complicated organizational problem and explain it through one dominant lens. Life isn't that simple.
For every complex and difficult problem with tons of nuance, there's a simple, easy and wrong solution
Now apply this to entire industries and entire countries, and we begin to see what is happening to all of Western Culture.
Success makes the old playbook feel safer than it really is.
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