On Insider amnesia, alluding to “the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect“:
When some problem with your company is posted on the internet, and you read people’s thoughts on it, their thoughts are almost always ridiculous. For instance, they might blame product managers for a particular decision, when in fact the decision in question was engineering-driven and the product org was pushing back on it. Or they might attribute an incident to overuse of AI, when the system in question was largely written pre-AI-coding and unedited since. You just don’t know what the problem is unless you’re on the inside.
But when some other company has a problem on the internet, it’s very tempting to jump in with your own explanations. After all, you’ve seen similar things in your own career. How different can it really be?
After working at a few prominent organizations over the years, this very much rings true. Large organizations are large, have complex internal dynamics, and it’s hard to guess why something is going on inside them without deep internal knowledge. It’s a good reminder.