02 Oct 2025 6 min read continuous improvement

Civic Virtue in Tech Culture: Why Responsibility Is More Revolutionary Than Disruption

In the modern tech world, disruption is the idol. But as we glorify speed and chaos, we rarely pause to ask what we have lost in the process. A world of fragility, marked by rushed decisions, shallow fixes, and performative output, has drifted us into lowering the bar to an unacceptable level.

1. Why Disruption Without Responsibility Is a Dead End

Founders are celebrated, rebels glorified, and slogans like "move fast and break things" echo through open-plan offices and pitch decks. But beneath the surface of this celebrated chaos lies a quieter truth: what sustains teams, platforms, and products over time is not disruption, but civic virtue.

2. Civic Virtue: A Classical Idea for Modern Teams

Civic virtue is an old idea, rooted in classical philosophy. To the Romans, it meant putting the public good above private interest. In a republic, it was the glue that held citizens together. In organisations, especially in tech, it is the quality that separates durable systems from glamorous collapses.

Where civic virtue thrives, engineers clean up code they did not write. They document edge cases. They close loops. They raise issues even when it is uncomfortable. Not for points or performance reviews, but because it is the right thing to do. This is not heroism. It is quiet stewardship, and it is what helps startups and scaleups thrive longer than the usual ephemeral monthly lifespan they cannot seem to overcome.

3. Cracks in the System: Broken Windows and Cultural Decay

Much like the Broken Windows Theory in urban policy, where visible signs of disorder invite further neglect, engineering cultures suffer when sloppiness becomes ambient.

The ignored flaky test, the TODO left to rot, the silent post-mortem, the ad-hoc request that pulls engineers out of focus, the unannounced release that silently breaks production, these are our broken windows.

Neglect signals decay. And once decay becomes culture, no process will save you. The signs are visible and measurable: once-mandatory engineering metrics like test coverage, complexity, or end-to-end health are quietly abandoned. Teams pervert agility into a theatre of rituals, incapable of delivering in small, incremental slices. Foundational behaviours, like writing tests, monitoring impact, reviewing code with care, disappear without challenge, because why not? When standards are no longer expected, mediocrity becomes default.

Civic virtue is what stops that decay at the root:

The willingness to care even when no one is watching.

4. The Hero Myth and the Erosion of Duty

In many teams, the most celebrated contributors are those who "save the day". But why was the day in danger to begin with? Often, it was because quiet responsibilities were ignored. Documentation skipped. Alerts muted. Standards bent.

This decay is not accidental. It is the result of a dangerous mix of ego and laziness. Ego demands visibility and praise. It avoids the silent work that sustains systems. Laziness avoids the effort required to uphold discipline. Together, they create a culture where spectacle replaces substance.

We reward those who chase glory, but overlook those who prevent the need for glory in the first place. The engineer who rewrites a flaky test suite or refactors brittle legacy code is rarely seen as a hero, but they are the reason your system still stands.

One step further, and we create a toxic environment, where beating the righteous feels easier than confronting the wrongdoer. When we fail to protect those who quietly uphold the system, we erode the very conditions for excellence to exist.

5. From Consumers to Citizens: Building Team Stewardship

Civic virtue in tech means behaving like a citizen of your team and platform, not merely a consumer of it. Citizens:

Fix things they did not break.
Refactor code without being told.
Mentor newcomers without ego.
Uphold standards even when it slows them down.
Invest in the commons, not just their lane.

These behaviours are not glamorous. But they are what make excellence repeatable, not accidental.

6. Practising Civic Virtue Daily: A Framework for Resilience

To implement civic virtue intentionally, especially as a counterweight to fragility, teams can start by codifying shared responsibilities and expectations:

Introduce visible commons ownership: rotate stewardship roles for documentation, release quality, or test maintenance.
Make engineering metrics non-negotiable: track and review coverage, complexity, build stability, and velocity together.
Create feedback cadences that prioritise team improvement over individual defensiveness.
Celebrate quiet consistency, not just loud interventions.
Build rituals of repair, a weekly slot to clean, refactor, or reinforce neglected components.

7. Cohesion Over Creativity: Lessons from History

The evolutionary power of such civic behaviour is not new. And when we look at real-world examples, across industries, decades, and outcomes, we see the same principle at work: when civic virtue is present, groups endure and excel. When it is absent, fragility takes hold.

Consider the Apollo 11 mission. NASA's success was not built on speed or iteration, but on methodical clarity, engineering humility, and shared responsibility. No one was freelancing. Everyone, from astronauts to mission control to software engineers like Margaret Hamilton, contributed with discipline, documentation, and deep respect for precision. It was civic virtue, not heroics, that put humanity on the Moon.

Now contrast that with the Boeing 737 MAX crisis. After its merger with McDonnell Douglas, Boeing's internal culture shifted. Engineering judgment was overridden by business pressures. Accountability blurred. Voices raising concerns about software flaws were ignored. The result: two crashes, hundreds dead, and one of the most tragic examples of civic failure in modern engineering history.

These cases tell a consistent story. Where civic virtue lives, systems flourish. Where it dies, collapse follows. First silently, then all at once.

As David Sloan Wilson shows in Darwin's Cathedral, groups that enforce high moral standards and mutual responsibility, like the Calvinist communities of early Geneva, often outcompete those that do not. These groups thrived not because they were the most creative or most tolerant, but because they were the most cohesive and disciplined. Their survival depended on strong norms, shared accountability, and the willingness of individuals to act for the greater good.

Tech teams, like those early communities, survive long-term not by tolerating every behaviour, but by aligning around a shared ethic of responsibility. Civic virtue is not an outdated ideal, but a proven strategy for group resilience.

8. Fragility by Design: The Disconnected World of Tech

Organisations are not factories. They are republics, fragile systems held together not by process, but by shared values. You do not scale these systems through control. You scale them through civic virtue at the edge: individual engineers choosing to care.

But we now live in a disconnected world, one where fragility is the norm. People are shielded from consequence, detached from reality, and increasingly isolated in digital bubbles. Empathy fades, belonging dissolves, and the individual reigns supreme, at the cost of collective strength. The idea of contributing to something larger than oneself has been replaced by hyper-personal ambition, often under the guise of self-expression or ideological purity.

And yet, we observe that the engineers who thrive the most, those who build solid systems, show discipline, and carry responsibility, often come from places untouched by wokism, where meritocracy still prevails. They bring with them values like respect for good work, reverence for family, and commitment to long-term contribution. Is this conservatism? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is simply preservation: the defence of group coherence, aligned with the same evolutionary group selection mechanisms described by David Sloan Wilson.

9. The Paradox of the Hero

This brings an interesting paradox to light: ego does not thrive in a vacuum. The hero syndrome contains the root of its own destruction. By refusing to support the group in order to shine individually, the so-called hero ultimately undermines the group’s ability to survive, thus extinguishing the very stage on which their ego performs.

In evolutionary terms, this is a maladaptive trait. True resilience lies not in exceptionalism, but in mutual reinforcement.

Civic virtue will not trend on Hacker News. But it will hold your team through storms. And it may just be the most revolutionary act in a world obsessed with noise.

10. A Return to Standards: Questions That Matter

So how do we begin restoring it? Perhaps we start by fixing what is broken. By grounding ourselves in the day-to-day embodiment of civic virtue. Leaders must reinforce it both culturally and operationally: through visible ownership, real accountability, and standards that are enforced, not just written. It means building teams where maintenance is not an afterthought, feedback is expected, and engineering principles are upheld without apology.

And yes, by returning to the fundamentals, even if it hurts feelings. There is no room for cultivated fragility or tolerated weakness in environments that demand high performance.

Ask yourself: do you truly fit into a professional engineering team if you do not comply with the basic rules that enable your company to thrive? Do you have your metrics in order? Can you assess the state of your codebase with clarity? Are you reinforcing test coverage, enabling auto-rollbacks, and instrumenting reliability? Do you track your team's delivery velocity with rigour? Can you give and receive blunt feedback without hiding behind emotion?

This is not about being harsh. It is about being honest, because in healthy systems, intent matters more than feelings. Feedback is not violence. Standards are not oppression. They are the lifeblood of long-term excellence.

After all, everyone has a choice: to manipulate and exploit the group for personal gain, or to continuously help the group thrive toward mutual betterment. But every action carries consequences.