How Successful Companies Go Blind

Successful Companies Go Blind

Ian Reppel compares successful companies to Mexican cavefish: they lose the ability to recognize good engineering not because the genes vanish, but because the environment stops rewarding the trait. Rapid hiring bends the bar until it disappears; engineers who have only known the in-house mess select for comfort with that mess. From the outside, brand and margins look fine; inside, deployments are fragile and docs are hieroglyphics. Proposing fixes reads as an attack on the identity of the engineers who built the status quo. Sighted hires either leave within a year or adapt until the adaptation is indistinguishable from loyalty. No specific companies are named.

Why it matters: A sharp, well-argued analogy for organizational decay, with a concrete mechanism. Held back from a higher score because it's a personal essay without data or named examples—strong commentary, not hard news.