Seeing like a software company

Why Large Orgs Value Legibility

• Many argue it’s less about “enterprise deals” per se and more about coordination at scale: once past Dunbar’s number, you need explicit processes so information can move in huge, sparse organizations.
• Internal and external audits demand process documents; in some sectors auditors can effectively “fire” you, so more paperwork = safety.
• Market-share forecasting and revenue predictability drive legibility: leaders want to see how dev work connects to future revenue, not just features shipped.
• Large software companies need legibility because they themselves are enterprises, not just because they sell to them.

Process, Bureaucracy, and Tribal Knowledge

• Commenters with big-company experience emphasize communication overhead as the main reason for process; writing things down both ossifies and enables scale.
• “Tribal knowledge” is seen as a powerful accelerator for small, tight teams but a liability for organizations that fear key-person risk and want interchangeable engineers.
• Several frame explicit rules as a substitute for trust; rules arise when you can’t rely on personal relationships.

Illegible Backchannels and Tiger Teams

• Many relate to the idea that real progress often happens via illegible channels: tiger teams, skunkworks, or side bets that bypass formal planning.
• Successes born this way are later retrofitted into legible business cases once risk is lower.
• DevOps and some security roles are described as permanently “sanctioned illegibility”: doing vital but hard-to-plan work that doesn’t fit neat sprint artifacts.
• Others counter that the deeper fix is to organize teams around clear value streams to minimize cross-team dependencies, rather than normalizing backchannels.

Tests, Metrics, and Legibility

• Testing is described as a legible proxy that can mislead: easy-to-measure metrics (coverage, TDD counts) invite the streetlight effect and Goodhart’s Law.
• Multiple comments stress that tests are inherently incomplete; dogfooding and qualitative judgment are needed to catch illegible bugs and assess “is it actually good?”

Politics, Game Theory, and Governance Analogies

• Office politics is compared to geopolitics: overlapping needs and fears, coalitions, and bargaining. Tools like “needs–fears conflict maps” are mentioned.
• A long subthread debates democracy vs autocracy as analogies for corporate governance—speed vs quality, transparency vs “moving fast and breaking things”—with no consensus.

Critiques of the Article’s Framing

• Some enterprise-side commenters say the article mischaracterizes customer priorities or overplays “small company good, big company pathological.”
• Others see the described dynamics as a symptom of broader capitalist pathologies (control, exploitation, bureaucracy) rather than neutral coordination mechanisms.