title: Software engineers should be a little bit cynical
author: u/fagnerbrack
contenttype: redditpost
publication: r/programming
published: 2026-02-27T19:17:36+00:00
sourceurl: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1rgg1wr/softwareengineersshouldbealittlebitcynical/
word_count: 58
Link: https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/
Score: 499 | Comments: 93 | Subreddit: r/programming
Top Comments
u/Dreamtrain (169 pts):
aren't we all in this field naturally like this to begin with?
u/Bartfeels24 (57 pts):
When you say engineers should be cynical, are you talking about healthy skepticism toward requirements and deadlines, or cynicism about the actual craft itself?
u/moreVCAs (756 pts):
My biggest linguistic pet peeve is this usage of cynical. Stop it. skepticism, materialism, and having eyes/ears/a brain is not “cynical”. These are not pedantic distinctions.
u/Humdaak_9000 (31 pts):
An ideal software engineer should be a hard-nosed pessimist with the liver of Hunter Thompson.
u/relic-nt (22 pts):
I think the right wording is that Software Engineers should practice critical thinking. I think the terms "logical thinking" and "critical thinking" are very useful to know and use, plus removes some of the stigma from the terms "cynical", "idealist", "wise", etc... IMO, questioning assumptions is not the same as being cynical.
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to guide belief and action. It involves questioning assumptions, evaluating evidence, and considering alternative viewpoints to reach sound, logical conclusions rather than accepting information at face value.
u/MedicineTop5805 (9 pts):
A healthy amount of skepticism definitely saves time, especially before committing to a shiny new stack.
u/PsychOwl2906 (9 pts):
Yeah, this really resonated with me.
I like the idea that a little cynicism is just being realistic about how big orgs actually work, not some kind of moral failure. Knowing that incentives and politics exist doesn’t mean you stop caring about good work, it just means you aim your effort where it can actually ship and matter.
The super “pure” idealist take feels nice, but it kind of assumes everyone’s acting in bad faith, which is its own brand of cynicism. Personally, the more idealistic move is understanding the system you’re in and still trying to push it in a better direction instead of pretending the system shouldn’t exist at all.
u/pa_dvg (17 pts):
No, dealing with cynical people all the time is exhausting. Every great team I was on was brimming with energy and enthusiasm. Be more like that.
u/Bartfeels24 (6 pts):
I watched a startup burn two years of runway because the team was too optimistic about their architecture and nobody wanted to be the cynical asshole pointing out that their monolith would implode at scale.
u/RedPandaDan (9 pts):
I think it’s also inaccurate: from my limited experience, the people who run large tech companies really do want to deliver good software to users.
Companies are structurally set up to collude on salaries, but they’re not set up to deliberately make their employees sad - they just don’t have that kind of fine-grained control over the culture! To the extent they have any control, they try to make their employees happy so they’ll work for less money and not leave.
Alex Jones has a more coherent view of the world than this guy.