The Cult of Being Wrong

3 min read

Tech culture has a strange relationship with being wrong. We build systems that assume we will fail. Automated tests. Rollback buttons. Canary deploys. Feature flags. Blameless postmortems. The entire software engineering discipline is an elaborate architecture for coping with the certainty of human error.

And then we hire, promote, and reward people who never seem to make one.

This is the central contradiction of the industry. We preach fail fast as a mantra while building workplaces where the safest career move is to never commit to a strong position. We celebrate move fast and break things while punishing the people who break the wrong thing. We hold retrospectives to learn from failure, then let the person who caused the failure know, quietly, that their next review will not be so forgiving.

The gap between what we say and what we reward is corroding the culture from the inside.

Consider the AI industry. I have lost count of the confident predictions made in 2023 and 2024 that simply evaporated. AGI by 2025. Software engineering fully automated by 2026. The end of search. I sat through conference keynotes where speakers declared these things with absolute certainty. And when the deadlines passed and the predictions fell short, those same speakers moved on to the next prediction without pause. No admission. No reflection. Just another shot at the same target.

Or take the framework wars. I remember when advocates of React declared that the virtual DOM was the only correct way to build interfaces. I remember when the same was said about Vue, Angular, Svelte, and now Solid. Years later, most reasonable engineers admit that each has tradeoffs and that the best choice depends on context. But during the war, admitting that the other side had a point was treated as weakness. You had to pick a hill and die on it, even if the hill was not that important.

Here is the irony. The people who build in public are forced to confront this contradiction directly. When you share your process openly, your wrong decisions are visible. Your failed bets are public. Your abandoned projects sit in your GitHub history for anyone to see. Building in public requires you to be wrong in public, and that is actually the healthy thing.

It forces a kind of intellectual honesty that most tech culture specifically discourages. You learn to say: I was wrong about that. I thought X would work, and it did not. Here is what I learned. You stop treating being wrong as a personal failure and start treating it as data. Good data. The kind that actually changes what you do next.

The companies and people I respect most have stopped pretending. They announce product pivots with the same energy they used to announce launches. They write candid postmortems about strategic mistakes. They publish the numbers that make them look bad. And somehow, this honesty makes them look better, not worse.

The cult of being wrong will not disappear overnight. Our incentives still reward omniscience. But the cure is not new frameworks or better management training. It is simply the willingness to, when you are wrong, say it out loud. The first time is terrifying. The tenth time is liberating. By the hundredth, you wonder why you ever pretended otherwise.

Tech is not supposed to be about being right. It is about building things that work. Those are different skills. Until we learn to separate them, we will keep building systems that expect failure and cultures that punish it.