“A bad system will beat a good person every time.” — W. Edwards Deming


At a mid-sized tech company, a senior engineer notices a pattern. It starts small. During code reviews, the most thoughtful comments slowly disappear. Not because the team has improved, but because certain comments change the temperature of meetings. Questions about long-term design delay releases. Concerns about architectural debt trigger debates no one has time for. So the feedback becomes safer. Shorter.

At first, it feels like professionalism.

The engineer still sees the problems. They just stop naming them.

Over time, this becomes instinct. Before typing a comment, they imagine the sprint timeline, the product manager’s reaction, the meeting that might follow. They imagine the explanation they would have to give, the momentum they would be accused of slowing, the tension that would linger after the call ends. The code works. The tests pass. The system will hold for now. Intelligence learns where friction lives and quietly steps around it.

This is not incompetence. It is adaptation.

Marcus Aurelius warned that the mind takes the shape of its surroundings. “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts,” he wrote but just as often, it is dyed with the color of its environment. A mind surrounded by urgency learns urgency. A mind surrounded by approval learns caution. Intelligence that goes unexamined does not aim itself toward truth; it aligns itself with what is rewarded.

In this environment, intelligence does not disappear. It becomes economical. It chooses silence where speech would cost too much. It learns to distinguish between what is correct and what is permissible, and slowly treats the second as more practical. Speed is praised. Certainty is trusted. Alignment is remembered. Hesitation lingers. Yet judgment is easiest to surrender quietly. No one asks the engineer to stop thinking. No one forbids questions. The environment does not punish intelligence it simply teaches it where not to go.

The engineer still thinks deeply. They still notice what is missing, what is deferred, what is quietly accumulating beneath the surface. But the thinking no longer travels far. It remains contained, disciplined by context, trimmed to fit the space it is allowed to occupy.

Nothing breaks. The product scales. The team grows.

And the absence of certain questions leaves no trace, no error, no alert, no record that they were ever there.