The Cavefish Trap: How Winning Companies Lose the Ability to See Good Engineering

The Mexican cavefish keeps its eye genes for a million years after abandoning sight — same species, same genome, but cave-born fish shut down lens development early and redirect that energy to smell and fat storage. The essay uses this as a model for what happens inside companies after they succeed: they don’t lose the capacity for careful engineering, they simply stop expressing it because the environment no longer rewards it. The author calls this competence blindness, and distinguishes it from the familiar story of incumbents dying by clinging to yesterday’s market. Blind companies don’t die — they persist for decades.

The mechanism is self-reinforcing hiring. Rapid growth forces fast headcount expansion, the bar bends and then vanishes, and engineers who’ve only ever known the house style end up on hiring panels selecting for comfort with the existing mess. After a few cycles the org is staffed with capable people who genuinely can’t tell anything is wrong: build pipelines only the author can run, deployments fragile enough to require permanent senior on-call, wikis rotted past usefulness — all while revenue looks healthy, so leadership assumes the foundations are solid. Engineers who push for overdue maintenance get told they’re over-engineering and academic; enough overruled proposals and the trait switches off. The predictable institutional response, a “centre of excellence,” concentrates and enforces standards in a way that suppresses the very distributed competence it claims to cultivate.

The piece ties this to market structure: where barriers to entry are high, the cave is geologically stable, no credible challenger forces discipline, and bureaucracy accumulates without penalty. Brand and salary keep attracting sighted engineers, some of whom leave within a year rather than adapt, with management blaming generational fickleness or culture fit rather than the environment. Extending Hirschman’s exit/voice/loyalty framework, the author adds a fourth outcome: staying is apoptosis — people adapt to cave pressures below their own awareness until adaptation is indistinguishable from loyalty. The optimistic note is that the genes aren’t gone; sight returns when the fish swims into new water, meaning suppressed competence can be reactivated in a healthier environment.