A reflection on how people consistently misinterpret problems at tech companies they don't work at, and why insider knowledge is crucial for understanding what's really happening.
When something goes wrong at a tech company, the internet erupts with explanations. Product managers are blamed for engineering decisions. AI is accused of writing code that predates modern AI tools. The narratives people construct are almost always wrong—but they're wrong in fascinatingly consistent ways.
This phenomenon deserves a name, and I'm calling it "insider amnesia." It's related to Gell-Mann amnesia (where experts recognize bad reporting in their field but trust the same sources elsewhere), but it's more specific: it's about how even experts get things fundamentally wrong when they're outsiders looking in.
The GitHub Actions Kerfuffle: A Case Study
The recent controversy over some problematic GitHub Actions code illustrates this perfectly. Many commentators seemed to have no mental model for how large tech companies actually produce software. Their frame of reference was something like "individual engineer maintaining an open-source project for ten years" or "tiny team of experts who all swarm on the same problem."
But large tech companies operate on completely different principles. Code gets written by hundreds of people who may never meet. Systems evolve over years with shifting ownership. What looks like incompetence from the outside might be the perfectly rational result of organizational complexity, technical debt, and the realities of scaling.
Why We're All Susceptible
The temptation to explain other companies' problems is overwhelming. After all, you've seen similar things in your own career. How different can it really be?
Very different, as it turns out. The dynamics of unusually big or small companies are often completely alien to outsiders. A startup's "chaotic" decision-making might be the only way to survive. A big company's "bureaucratic" process might be the only way to coordinate thousands of engineers.
The Expert Blind Spot
What makes insider amnesia particularly insidious is that it affects experts writing in their own areas of expertise. A senior engineer who can diagnose their own company's problems with precision will confidently misinterpret what's happening elsewhere. The issue isn't lack of knowledge—it's lack of context.
You just don't know what the problem is unless you're on the inside. The product org might be pushing back on an engineering-driven decision. A system might be largely pre-AI code that's never been touched by modern tools. The real story is almost always more nuanced than the internet's hot takes.
The Broader Pattern
This isn't just about tech companies. It's about how we interpret any complex system we're not directly part of. We project our own experiences and mental models onto situations that operate on entirely different principles.
The next time you see a tech company struggling publicly, remember insider amnesia. The people explaining what "must" be happening are almost certainly wrong—not because they're stupid, but because they're outsiders. And being an outsider, even an expert one, means you're missing crucial context that completely changes the story.
The featured image captures the essence of this phenomenon: looking in from the outside, trying to make sense of something that only makes sense from within.
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