Successful companies go blind
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Companies that succeed and then stop hiring competent engineers go blind to their own declining standards.
The article uses the Mexican cavefish as an analogy: it keeps eye genes but loses sight because the cave environment does not reward vision. Similarly, successful companies that hire rapidly and insulate themselves from outside talent develop 'competence blindness.' Engineers who propose improvements are seen as misaligned, and centers of excellence often suppress the very trait they claim to cultivate. The cave is geologically stable-high barriers to entry allow incumbents to tolerate waste. Staying in such an environment gradually adapts employees to the cave's norms, a form of apoptosis.
What commenters are saying
Commenters broadly agree with the blindness analogy but expand on its causes. A top comment argues that any feedback loop scoring itself on a signal it produces will go blind-nothing in the environment ever contradicts the loop. Others note that LLMs accelerate this by compounding groupthink, and that corporations themselves are 'original AIs' producing depersonalized output. A dissenting view holds that big company employees are not stupid; structural constraints and short-term profit focus, not individual blindness, drive the problem. One commenter praises the cavefish framing as generalizable beyond hiring to any system that rewards its own metrics.