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Insider amnesiaSpeculation about what’s really going on inside a tech company is almost always wrong.

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? Very different, as it turns out.

This is especially true for companies that are unusually big or small. The recent kerfuffle over some bad GitHub Actions code is a good example of this - many people just seemed to have no mental model about how a large tech company can produce bad code, because their mental model of writing code is something like “individual engineer maintaining an open-source project for ten years”, or “tiny team of experts who all swarm on the same problem”, or something else that has very little to do with how large tech companies produce software1. I’m sure the same thing happens when big-tech or medium-tech people give opinions about how tiny startups work.

The obvious reference here is to “Gell-Mann amnesia”, which is about the general pattern of experts correctly disregarding bad sources in their fields of expertise, but trusting those same sources on other topics. But I’ve taken to calling this “insider amnesia” to myself, because it applies even to experts who are writing in their own areas of expertise - it’s simply the fact that they’re outsiders that’s causing them to stumble.

I wrote about this at length in How good engineers write bad code at big companies

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The most shameful thing I did in the workplace was lie to a colleague. It was about ten years ago, I was a fresh-faced intern, and in the rush to deliver something I’d skipped the step of testing my work in staging. It did not work. When deployed to production, it didn’t work there either. No big deal, in general terms: the page we were working on wasn’t yet customer-facing. But my colleague asked me over his desk whether this worked when I’d tested it, and I said something like “it sure did, no idea what happened”.Continue reading...