Seeing like a software company
Why don’t large companies react to [inefficiency] by doing away with all of their processes? Are they stupid? No. The processes that slow engineers down are the same processes that make their work legible to the rest of the company. And that legibility (in dollar terms) is more valuable than being able to produce software more efficiently...
This is leaving my area of expertise somewhat, but I’m pretty sure the main answer is large enterprise deals. Making deals with large enterprise customers is fantastically profitable. Any sufficiently large SaaS will thus pivot from small customers to enterprise customers, if it can. But enterprise deals (a) can take many, many months to set up, and (b) require making long-term feature commitments. An illegible company is not configured to be able to stick with a boring enterprise deal for many months, constantly answering questions and delivering features.
The whole thing is worth reading.
One interesting note from my own career is that there are cases of mutual illegibility. What's legible to a government agency may not be legible to a large tech vendor, and vice versa. This can lead to spectacular inabilities to work productively together from two organizations that are otherwise very competent.