Low Hanging Fruit

What happened to all the low-hanging fruit?

small fruit

Small fruit is everywhere. The more access you have to an organization, the more small fruit you can find. Regularly, when onboarding with a new company, I repeatedly guffaw: really? You don’t have a process for X? There’s no documentation for Y? These are often small or new organizations run by people with limited experience, either because they’ve only worked for one or two other companies, or because it’s outside their wheelhouse: these are engineering problems that a team of marketing specialists is trying to deal with.

Small fruit grows when something begins to outscale its current form. A team of one becomes a team of two, and suddenly version control becomes extremely important. A team of two becomes a team of four, and suddenly CI/CD becomes a huge time-saver and danger-reducer. A team of four becomes a team of twenty, and suddenly a “processes & standards” working group focused on improving DX can make a huge difference. If more than ten thousand people use your product and it has more than a few UI components, you probably want a designer, at least on retainer. More complex codebases benefit from tests and refactors and scalable architecture. Bigger teams really do benefit from project managers. Etc., etc.

Companies hire when they’re growing, so if you join a new company, the odds are in your favor that you’ll notice something that could be improved. Small fruit like this is everywhere, and it’s likely to be where you’ll be.

big fruit

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but my intuition is that there’s not much low-hanging big fruit anymore. But is this really true? Is this equivalent to me complaining about how kids these days lack decorum, and some very smart person is going to show me a quote from Seneca or Aristotle complaining about the same thing 1500 years ago? Low hanging fruit always seems to be there for those who have the eyes to see it. It feels like there used to be more, though. When the internet was first coming online, there was tons of low-hanging fruit. Same with the industrial revolution. Maybe same with crypto, though it’s hard to tell. Definitely same with AI. But what about the low-hanging fruit not predicated upon huge technological leaps? Are we just out of that? Has our knowledge/efficiency as a species really grown that much? Or to most, has it always felt like there’s not much low-hanging fruit? Is the very idea that it’s “low-hanging” just a subjective view, and that to other people it’s either invisible (which is why it’s still there) or it’s harder to reach for them? Being in the web-dev space, for instance, helps people cash in on most major technological leaps (I’m mostly thinking about AI here). A web developer can easily spin up and monetize a specialized frontend for a particular LLM use-case.

Was it a lack of expertise that blinded people to the LHF? Or was it a lack of general awareness? “I’m busy, I don’t want to think about AI, it stresses me out, just let me live my life” vs “I bet AI is really cool to work with, if only I knew how to code”.

A case for more LHF existing in the past is that there were fewer people working to find it. LHF was gated behind institutions. You couldn’t run experiments or have access to academic journals without academic credentials. Equipment for physical experiments was often prohibitively expensive. And no internet meant it was extremely important to be located at the heart of where the state of the art was being worked on. This excluded 95% of the world from working on important problems in any given field, in the best of cases. Now all of a sudden, e.g. OpenAI can recruit globally for positions, and grab exponentially more talented and productive researchers and developers than they could before, if we assume a long tail to human capability. Inevitably, most people like myself, and possibly you, will be more thoroughly outcompeted for opportunities to revolutionize the world. At least, that’s one view of it. And I still don’t know if it’s correct or not.