The silent majority
I was re-reading Nixon’s 1969 “silent majority” speech last week (Smithsonian ran a good breakdown in 2017), mostly because YouTube’s algorithm pushed it on me after a Watergate documentary. Nixon wasn’t talking about the anti-war crowd, as I had misremembered — he was appealing to Americans who quietly supported the Vietnam War while the televised protests took center stage. The framing stuck with me: a huge, almost invisible block of people whose daily lives never make the highlight reel.
Swap politics for software and the pattern barely changes. Most of the code that keeps planes in the air and payrolls running is written by folks you will never see at a conference or on a podcast. They’re the industry’s own silent majority, and (I could be wrong, but) I think we repeatedly underestimate their influence because they don’t tweet release notes every other day.
These engineers debug production issues at 2 a.m., keep ancient Pascal services humming, and push fixes straight to master because the CI script predates modern branch strategies. They’re not arguing about whether Nix flakes are the future — half of them haven’t even heard the argument. They just need the build to finish before lunch.
If that group collectively went on strike tomorrow, thousands of systems would stall (maybe not catastrophically, but enough to ruin your Monday). I don’t have hard numbers — nobody does — yet after fifteen-odd years running teams, my gut says the flashy 1 % gets most of the airtime while the other 99 % quietly ship features.
You can see the gap online. Scroll Twitter for ten minutes and it feels as if everyone is building another crypto wallet. Step outside, mention the same project to your neighbors, and you’ll get blank stares. Nielsen’s old 90-9-1 rule still holds: roughly 1 % create, 9 % comment, the rest lurk. Most of tech discussion happens inside that narrow creator slice, which is why the vibes rarely match reality.
Silent Engineers
Skimming Hacker News during breakfast, I sometimes catch myself thinking every developer works at Meta or Netflix — the front page is full of “How we migrated 3 PB from S3 in a weekend”-type war stories. Give it a beat, though, and you’ll also spot threads from people maintaining PHP 5.6 shops, or porting COBOL to Go because the last mainframe vendor doubled their prices. The comment mix isn’t as lopsided as it first appears; there’s usually a lively sub-thread pushing back. (Microservices? Check any HN post — you’ll see architecture absolutists and monolith loyalists fighting it out.)
The “everyone hates PHP” meme is aging out, by the way — Laravel and PHP 8 have earned the language a second wind. Yet articles dunking on it still float to the top because negativity draws clicks. Meanwhile, millions of lines of perfectly boring PHP code pay the rent without ever making Hacker News.
Plenty of solid engineers I know have never opened HN at all. Some are heads-down in regulated industries where Reddit threads don’t help them ship medical-device firmware. Others signed so many NDAs over the years their résumés look suspiciously short. (One ex-colleague joked that, on paper, he appears unemployable.)
I’ll admit: I like writing, so my name pops up more than most. That skews perception too — loud voices, mine included, can crowd out quieter, equally valid experiences. I have to remind myself that the comment section isn’t a statistical sample; it’s whoever had time and inclination to post that day.
Generational churn complicates everything. Each cohort learns a different “obvious” stack, so when they hit the same discussion thread they talk past one another. Yesterday’s “write a shell script” becomes today’s “spin up a Lambda.” Neither side is wrong; they just grew up with different defaults.
Some developers signed so many NDAs over the years it almost looks like they did nothing at all.
The nice surprise: a slice of that silent crowd still files drive-by pull requests. Empty GitHub accounts, two-line fix, no fanfare. The project moves forward, nobody argues tabs vs. spaces, life goes on. That’s the internet I want to believe in.
Silent Users
Products have the same participation pyramid. You’ll hear a lot from power users who love (or hate) every pixel, a little from casuals, and absolutely nothing from the bulk who just need the thing to work. I hardly ever fill out feedback forms myself — if the service does the job, I close the tab and move on.
The trap is optimizing solely for whoever yells the loudest. I’ve seen teams overhaul onboarding flows because roughly 20 people complained on Twitter, only to watch activation rates drop for the other more than 20,000 who never asked for a change. Proper analytics — funnels, cohort retention, the unglamorous stuff — gives the silent majority a proxy voice.
(Small caution: those same users will leave without a warning shot if you slip up. Low-maintenance ≠ loyal.)
The problem with silent customers is that while they often demand very little, they will also silently switch providers if they’re not happy.
In defense of being vocal
Publishing is work. This short newsletter took most of a Sunday morning, two coffees, and one playlist that annoyed my neighbors. That friction explains why the 1 % stays tiny: there’s always something more urgent than polishing paragraphs nobody asked for.
Then there’s the comment gauntlet. Post an opinion and someone will disagree, often within minutes and occasionally with creative insults. The first time that happened to me I lost the rest of the day doom-scrolling replies. Now I skim, extract any useful signal, and close the tab. You build calluses.
My thoughts
Quiet craftsmanship keeps the lights on, but I still nudge people to speak up when they can. Every extra voice widens the reference set the rest of us draw from. After a talk I gave on this topic, a couple of self-described lurkers emailed to say they posted their first comment because “somebody had to balance the thread.” Small victory, but it shows the effect snowballs.
You don’t need to become a thought leader (whatever that means). A gist explaining a weird edge-case, a bug report with repro steps, a 200-word blog post — that’s plenty. The worst outcome is a downvote. The best is somebody, somewhere, solves a problem two hours faster because you bothered to hit publish.
Of course, you can get downvoted, but who cares?
I won’t pretend the fear vanishes; it doesn’t. But the upside compounds and the downside stays a rounding error. That seems like a bet worth taking.
Other Newsletter Issues:
- ⛓ Implementing Atomic Habits in IT
- 🏆 Promotion-based development
- Software Development is very subjective
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27 Comments
Nice post 🙂 Please keep on being vocal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority
Eh, your praise of the silent majority seems to be not thought through. Because the silent majority often does not even know HN and the discussions exist. They are clueless, about engineering, architecture, pros and cons and just implement, best practices handed down to them in craftmanship kind of way. That can work out and it can go horrible wrong, as soon as it leaves its familiar element. But i have cleaned up some of those, lets call it nicer “naive implementations” and oh, boy do they produce code. The place i talk about, programmed C, did not use VC, had no opinion about proper interfaces, and tried to squash theire problems by hiring exponential silent majority people. Silence is also the mark of the fool thinking it is alone, the only master of its domain. No voice to be heard on mount dunning kruger.
Hello. Nice article!
Silent engineers are the number one reason projects go to shit
Partial agree.
“I’ve seen so much hate some languages get”
You’ve never heard of RPG? (Report Program Generator). The vilest of languages.
Nice read
I hope the next lesson is speaking up without plagiarism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority
I disagree with the comment of Anonymous.
> I hope the next lesson is speaking up without plagiarism (sites Wikipedia article)
How much of Wikipedia is properly cited? 10-15%? Come down from the high horse, this is someone’s personal blog…
Hummm. I would consider myself a mix of vocal and silent engineer.
When I express my technical expert to the team, and some super vocal junior graduate likes the sound of his voice so much, that he can’t stop pretending he’s good enough, at some stage those animals get someanagment attention, mostly because I’m tired of arguing, after a long coding session, while that junior mostly watch même all day. At the end, I choose to shut up, and observe the business going to trash itself by choosing vocal metrics over l.o.c. metrics – while I am navigating other job offers, or checking good holiday deals.
I think there are an incredible number of differences that can make or break the code. How about you try to make a web application in Visual Basic or Bash and let us know if you would like some opinions.
It’s not the issue of a silent majority, I believe it’s more of an issue where people that are being vocal are not qualified or experienced enough to be vocal on certain issues. They just pick up an opinion somewhere on the internet and keep regurgitating it for internet points, affirmation and the illusion of belonging to a certain group. This is all amplified by the existence of platforms like HN, Hashnode and Dev.to that are helping drive the trend that being a vocal engineer is an important checkmark on your “how to become a good engineer roadmap” – even if you have nothing of value that you could add to the conversation. Those platforms are choke-full of low-quality, low-effort content.
I remember when this first affected me. I’m low level vocal online, but have an active github these days.
Anyway, it was during an interview, and one of the engineers who was involved was top tier “brogrammer” and had issues that he hadn’t heard of me online and in the local meetup comminity.
I wondered then as I do now… what in the name of xor has that got to do with ability?
I didn’t get the job. What a shame.
I will say this, engineers that don’t speak up in their team… waste every opportunity to course correct shit that’s going off the rails.
It doesn’t help that “The confidently incorrect” have invaded the development space as “product owners” and other utterly pointless minds and bodies (at least when it comes to building software.)
Why did that happen!? Next article on this “challenging” topic.
I find the main issue is not so much a lack of being vocal as (in no order):
– never studying the basics like gof , MVC, etc.
– relentless masturbation to every shiny new toy
– an absolute unquenchable dis-f-ing interest in tools of the past, and what was good/bad about them
Problem is not in silence, but morons who PREVENT you from being heard. All those idiotic registrations is step #1 to keep you away. I HATE register on every small “web-trash” just to say truth. Second, the language. I use strong words and I HAVE RIGHT to use ’em. It’s expression of my feelings. But instead of hearing “strong truth”, idiot-admin just ban me. Third, your voice CHANGE NOTHING. If you critic some bug/feature (which even should not exist if programmers had brain), nobody listen you! Nobody is fired for incompetency. Nobody even get fines. In this “no-consequences” world it’s USELESS to waste time on corporate chats – nothing changes. THIS is why we don’t express opinion anymore – nobody cares.
Get your own website and you can speak your mind without having to register on somebody else’s website.
Thanks for the time. Just one question good sir… why?
— You average silent programmer who brings out the🍿when top vocal engineer rip each other apart over tools
I think I would call technology the hype cycle. I got into tech early as a teenager with a part-time job back in the 90s during the shortages and .com boom.
What I have noticed is tech most big tech companies have a hype cycle. During the first part, you hear about the technology every place and everyone is going to be using it. They push a lot of companies to use it so you get a lot of job postings on it. You come up on the bust cycle the tech does not live up to what was told it would do. After that, you get into the productive part of the technology being used in a productive way the “plateau of productivity”.
The majority of people work in the “plateau of productivity” using technology that has been proven to be productive in what they do.
Pick any technology you will see this same pattern over and over again. From networking, Mainframe, Websites, Database, AI,cloud and blockchains.
I think silicon valley is great at the hype cycle. They sell the world on revolutionary technologies but in reality, they are selling evolutionary technology. We are years if not decades away from AI cars and robots being all over the place.
I’m in the US and have held most jobs (Developer, Lead, Manager) but try to stay a Developer and get pushed into the other jobs. And I teach Programming and Data Structures at the local Community College one night a week. Out of a typical class there are maybe 3 or 4 who should pursue being a Programmer, the rest are varying degrees of frightening. Unfortunately, academia is not interested in capability, they are interested (just like any bureaucracy) in perpetuating itself by showing success, with success being defined by finished courses. Note that is finished, not accomplished, succeeded, or met a standard.
And I echo most of the comments that the silent (probably the more knowledeable) majority is naturally suppressed by the vocal idiots. And the vocal knowledgeable get lost in the crowd of vocal idiots.
I find the difference between HackerNews and tech-related subreddits pretty funny.
On HN, it’s hard to find a comment that is not written by someone from FAANG, who will look down at you if you make anything below 150k USD/year, even though you live in Europe where money goes a much, much longer way. They don’t have the problem of solving thousands of LeetCode tasks just to get a job, like a monkey in the circus, juggling and doing tricks for claps and attention.
On the opposite hand, subreddits are often filled with fairly junior developers that just echo whatever they read in the last medium article from their favorite public speaker. You can’t have your own opinion there, you will just get downvoted to hell if it’s any different from the fad of the month.
In that particular aspect I find HN much better – there’s no downvoting, so every voice kind of matters.
I’m from central EU where HN is not that popular, but in my 6 years of experience, I don’t think I’ve met a single other developer that would visit HN, most didn’t even know that reddit has tech-related subreddits. I guess that’s the silent majority right there. I just use those to get tech related news that might interest me because I like to be up to date, though most people I work with don’t care. They just come in, do their job, write the code like they always did for last 5-10 years and get off at 5pm. I hate that, but I also understand that _most_ people don’t strive to be better at what they do.
HN has flagging and downvoting. You need to reach a certain score to be able to downvote/flag.
The article brings to light how often the most productive engineers are the ones who aren’t constantly in the spotlight, voicing opinions online. It’s a good reminder that work often speaks louder than words. Also, the point about silent customers is spot-on – their inactivity can sometimes speak volumes about a product’s usability or satisfaction level.
I always thought the loudest devs got the most attention, but in my experience, the ones silently coding away often solve the biggest problems. It’s a bit like being a part of a hidden guild of problem solvers that doesn’t seek the spotlight. The part about silent users really resonated with me, making me rethink how I assess user satisfaction with the apps I develop. I started paying more attention to passive analytics rather than loud feedback and noticed patterns I was missing before. It’s interesting how much you can learn from the quiet ones, both in coding and user feedback.
If you get downvoted on reddit then you get banned (shadowban).
god forbid you say anything the mob doesn’t agree with on there. or give criticism about any tools, because the retards there feel like you are attacking them, so they downvote you insult you, and then eventually you get shadow banned because your karma score got too low.
fuck reddit