Staying Opinionated as You Grow
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
hugo.writizzy.comOtherstory
calmmixed
Debate
80/100
Product DevelopmentCompany GrowthInnovation
Key topics
Product Development
Company Growth
Innovation
The article discusses the importance of staying opinionated and focused as a company grows, while the discussion highlights the challenges and controversies surrounding this approach.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
24h
Peak period
23
24-36h
Avg / period
7.6
Comment distribution38 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 38 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Nov 5, 2025 at 9:07 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 6, 2025 at 8:43 AM EST
24h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
23 comments in 24-36h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 10, 2025 at 3:39 PM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45823000Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 5:51:32 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...
> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
I suppose if I want to use the word to mean the original sense, I need to include clarification that that's what I'm doing. I'll have to think of how best to do that without coming across as judgy or condescending, since that's sort of police-y (and also just unpleasant).
Entropy in action, eh?!
Of course we can. We can also use it mean "product became wonderful".
The question, as always, is if we should.
Sorry about that. I realize this term has a very strict meaning in English, but it's a bit less true in my language (French).
I responded to this in another comment above, but basically I was using the term to encompass everything that contributes to degrading a product. Everything that makes it more complex, often tied to company growth (I started a company in 2012 that's now 700 people).
But I get the point. I see this touches on another topic around corporate malpractice. I honestly wasn't even aware of that.
Now I know :)
Froggies doing wrong cultural appropriation again... maybe the "Emilia Perez syndrome" is becoming a thing.
I wanted to read a new story; one about an internal debate where the easy answer was to "just do it," but a hard no is what actually saved everything.
Surely that story exists.
I connected it to simplicity and focus. In my head the link was clear, but I get that it's not as obvious when written :)
I'm using this blog as a kind of journal—short posts, quick thoughts. So I totally understand if it leaves you wanting more.
Honestly didn't expect this much traffic, my other posts have just been read by friends ^^
That is not what enshittification is about, and not who it is about. You don't enshittify to please users, you do it to please shareholders.
One is many products start out pleasing most users, but pivots to enterprise customers because of revenue. Thus, the product shifts heavily towards the enterprise use-case of a few customers at the loss of most small-medium users. Getting more users in this enterprise world means making changes to accommodate special needs and that leads to entropy.
Another new need is to hit next quarters revenue targets, so companies find more juice to squeeze somewhere.
Arguably it was a poor choice of word, but some of us would still like to be able to refer to that specific phenomenon.
I was thinking more about all the factors that increase product complexity, and it's far from being just about shareholders:
* The more people you add to a company, the more complexity you add because inherently, everyone wants to leave their mark. In the end, some people see themselves grow because they contributed to this or that new feature. Doesn't matter if it's redundant. Doesn't matter if 10 months later you realize it adds nothing. I've unfortunately seen this pattern repeat itself over and over.
* The bigger a company gets, the more it needs to respond to increasingly specific use cases. A salesperson tells you their client needs this. Customer support tells you a portion of your users are asking for that. Either you have enough perspective to say it doesn't fit your vision, or you don't, and you try to please everyone. But it's a huge source of complexity. And I could cite tons of examples from my old company.
And just to be transparent, I am using my blog as a journal, with short posts. I was not expecting that much traffic and I totally understand that it's maybe not as deep as you would expect ^^
Of course he followed it up with a book, so there's that as well if you want a deeper dive, but the essay is fairly comprehensive at least in laying out what he intends by the term.
All successful startups are fighting a battle against entropy. And entropy is becoming indistinguishable from all the other companies out there. Which means losing what made them succeed in the first place.
This is why company culture is important. You need to know what your values are. And then you need to maintain them. Even at the cost of the wrong short-term profitable opportunities.
That aged well...
But that doesn't invalidate the importance of the principles on which Zappos succeeded under his leadership.
It is a mistake to dismiss key insights merely because they come from someone who had human flaws. We all have human flaws, and we all make mistakes.
This reads more like some corporate-aimed PR than earnest words that left the mouth of a human
If you take bigger salary in exchange of defrauding people, say by denying insurance payment to people who should have it, you dont have "not defrauding" as a value.
Every US president since FDR would have “not killing everyone” as a value by not hitting the big red button. Almost nobody else will get to be tested in that way. Is that actually a value?
There is also a private information problem. If it never occurred to me to defraud investors, but it was retroactively discovered I could have (and gotten away with it?), do I get the “doesn’t defraud” value? Does the more evil version of me get the value, as long as they thought of it but didn’t act on it?
This doesn't apply, your morals are only tested once you have to sacrifice something that you find valuable in order to uphold your morals, whether that is money, power, or something else.
The point that he was explaining when I saw the quote was why the hiring process at Zappos had a "culture fit" part of the interview process. Because you can't maintain a culture, if you have employees who aren't aligned on values. Maintaining this requires passing up on opportunities to hire people who will be productive, because you think that they will undermine the culture.
The importance of culture as a value to the organization is demonstrated by passing up on opportunities that would undermine it. Even if those opportunities are otherwise good.
And while you may consider corporate culture to be bullshit, others don't. Where others includes every entrepreneur who built a large company that I've ever seen speak on the subject.
I've been lucky enough to see good versus bad corporate cultures first hand. So I also fit into that other bucket. Though admittedly more looking at the issue from somewhere near the bottom, rather than the view from the top.
When you're building, adding yet another feature can sometimes shave off all the edges that made you successful in the first place.
Same with messaging. The more you try to sound universal, the less anyone hears you.
Strong opinions that are honestly held and communicated are such great signs of respect. It's refreshing to see: "This is who we are. If it's not for you, that's okay."
Good piece.
No, they get shitty because businesses need to move the needle. Product people and engineers want to put things that "show" they did that on their resume.
Want to get to market rate? Then do a project that will get you your next job. That isnt going to be exclusively for the company, thats going to be as much for you as it is for them.
The fundamental problem is that if you aren't upping your staff's salary to market rates, you're forcing them to do the above. Without the money, your interests DO NOT ALIGN.
This results in some people having very strange opinions about work (clock punching) and doing the minimum to get by. It results in strange corporate polices where incompetence starts to blend in with the furniture and no one knows how to get them "unstuck".
A better example: What is a smart phone? It does hundred things for which there were special tools for each those usecases. But the phone killed all those super-simple, opinionated, single-purpose tools.