[smugglerFlynn]

This is an interesting thought model to consider, but whole article is very biased and opinionated. It reads like a "small companies do it better" manifesto without giving any real insights into operations of large companies.

For example, all of the goals quoted below are parametrized and tracked by most of large & mature companies, oftentimes daily, through NPS, cost/profit analysis, and many other "legit but inefficient" tools:

  > Note that “shipping high quality software” or “making customers happy” or even “making money” is not on this list. Those are all things tech companies want to do, but they’re not legibility.

There is a premise that closing a blind eye on these makes companies "less efficient", but evidently there are large companies that do track achievement of such goals, and there are small companies that don't.

There is also insider information appealing as evidence ("Any practicing engineer knows how ridiculous this is.”), mocking ("Are they stupid? No.”) and survivorship bias (treating most small companies as "more efficient” by default) among multiple other rhetorical tricks and anecdotes. It captures the frustration engineers feel in large orgs, but then inflates that into a universal theory of how all companies operate.

[johnbcoughlin]

You seem to have misunderstood the point being made in the section you quoted. The items are not on the list because it is a list of benefits that accrue to the company from work being legible. "Making money" is not a direct outcome of legibility, although it is a second or third-order effect.

[smugglerFlynn]

What I am saying is that “making money” is one factor most of legibility processes directly revolve around in any modern company. Not a second-order side effect, as original article implies.