Stable Markets Breed Competence Blindness

Stable market dominance turns engineering mediocrity into an evolutionary advantage where staying blind is rewarded and pointing out the darkness is punished. Rapid hiring at scale creates self-perpetuating hiring panels that select for tolerance of the existing mess, making structural competence impossible to hire. Careful engineering and architectural discipline become vestigial traits, actively suppressed by an environment that does not return the energy spent on them. Meanwhile, corporate centres of excellence typically centralize and bureaucratize standards, destroying distributed intrinsic motivation and enforcing compliance over actual quality. Finally, staying at a dysfunctional firm is a gradual, unconscious adaptation that erodes the engineer's skills and ability to function outside the cave.