A Love Letter to Survivorship Bias in Tech

How many times have you seen a picture of a plane with red dots posted on the internet without context? There's a famous story about a statistician named Abraham Wald and a bunch of WWII bombers. The military looked at the planes coming back from combat, mapped where they were riddled with bullet holes, and decided to add armor there. Wald, being the kind of person who ruins meetings by being right, pointed out the obvious thing nobody wanted to hear: The planes they were looking at came back . The ones hit in the spots with no bullet holes, the engine, the cockpit, were at the bottom of the English Channel, not available for the survey. Reinforce the parts that aren't shot up. That's where the dead planes got hit. I think about this story a lot, mostly while reading those blog posts titled "X Habits That Made Me a 10x Engineer." The entire industry is a returning-plane survey Here is the uncomfortable thing about software engineering wisdom: almost all of it is collected from the planes that came back. Successful companies write blog posts. Successful founders do podcast tours. Successful engineers give conference talks with titles like "Scaling to 100 Million Users with Three People and a Dream." The companies that did the exact same things and died do not have a booth at the conference. They are not on the panel. They are in the channel, with the engines. And yet we keep doing the survey. We stare at the bullet holes on the survivors and go, "Ah, this is where we add armor." "Netflix uses microservices, so we should too" You have eleven users. Three of them are your co-founders, and one is your mom. Netflix runs a globe-spanning streaming empire on hundreds of microservices because they have hundreds of teams, billions in revenue, and problems you will be lucky to have in a decade. You have a Postgres database that is doing just fine, thank you, and a monolith that boots in four seconds. So naturally, you spend the next eight months splitting your perfectly funct