Tech Is Addicted to Vibes
Confidence over competence, every time.
You know what’s wild? The tech industry has spent decades pretending it’s meritocratic, data-driven, and rational. Meanwhile, the whole damn thing runs on vibes.
I’m not talking about “culture fit” or “team dynamics” or whatever HR-approved euphemism you want to slap on it. I’m talking about the uncomfortable truth that in 2026, your ability to seem competent matters infinitely more than your ability to be competent. And we’re all just pretending this is fine.
The Confidence Game
Let me paint you a picture. You’re in a meeting. Someone confidently proclaims that migrating to microservices will solve all your scaling problems. They’ve got charts. They’ve got buzzwords. They’ve got energy. Never mind that your monolith is working fine and the real bottleneck is your database queries. Never mind that this person has never actually led a microservices migration. They said it with their whole chest, so everyone nods along.
That’s the vibe economy in action.
Meanwhile, the senior engineer who actually knows your codebase tries to raise concerns. But they’re hemming and hawing, mentioning edge cases, talking about tradeoffs. Boring. No vibes detected. Overruled.
How We Got Here
Tech’s obsession with confidence over competence didn’t happen overnight. It’s been brewing for years, fed by a toxic cocktail of venture capital, founder worship, and the myth of the “visionary leader.”
Think about it. We celebrate people who “move fast and break things.” We idolize executives who can pitch a vision even when the vision makes no goddamn sense. We promote people who are good at talking in meetings over people who are good at, you know, the actual job.
The whole system is designed to reward performance. Not job performance. Theatrical performance.
The Executive Suite Is Where Vibes Go to Thrive
If you want to see the vibe economy in its final form, look at executive leadership. It’s basically a confidence pageant with stock options.
These folks have mastered the art of saying absolutely nothing with complete conviction. They’re fluent in corporate speak. They can turn any failure into a “learning opportunity” and any success into proof of their visionary leadership (even when they had nothing to do with it).
And here’s the kicker: the higher you go, the less your actual competence matters. You just need to project authority. Make bold statements. Have opinions on things you don’t understand. Show up to meetings and say “interesting” a lot while nodding thoughtfully.
I’ve watched executives who couldn’t code their way out of a paper bag make technical decisions that affect thousands of engineers. I’ve seen leaders who’ve never done the actual work tell the people doing the work that they’re doing it wrong. And when things inevitably fall apart? They’re already at their next company, leaving the mess for everyone else.
Why Competence Lost
Here’s the uncomfortable part: there are reasons we ended up here, even if they’re shitty reasons.
Competence is hard to measure. Confidence is easy to spot. When you’re making hiring or promotion decisions, especially if you don’t actually understand the technical work, you default to: who seems like they know what they’re doing?
Plus, confidence is contagious. A confident person makes everyone around them feel more confident, even when they’re confidently leading you off a cliff. It feels good to follow someone who seems certain, even when certainty is completely unwarranted.
Competence, on the other hand, comes with caveats. Competent people know enough to understand complexity. They see the edge cases. They’re comfortable saying “it depends” and “I don’t know.” That doesn’t make for inspiring all-hands presentations.
The Ghosting Economy
Let’s talk about what this does to hiring, because holy hell is it broken.
You apply for jobs. Maybe you hear back, maybe you don’t. The job description was probably a lie anyway. It said “mid-level engineer” but they’re actually looking for a senior engineer who’ll accept mid-level pay. Or they’re not looking at all because the req is frozen but they haven’t taken down the posting.
If you do get an interview, it’s a performance. Can you confidently solve algorithm puzzles you’ll never use? Can you explain your past work in a way that sounds impressive, even if the work was mundane? Can you project enthusiasm for a company whose product you’ve never used?
And then the ghosting. Oh, the ghosting. You spend hours prepping. You do multiple rounds of interviews. You meet with six different people. And then... silence. No rejection email. No feedback. Nothing.
Because giving you an honest answer would require someone to do actual work. Much easier to just let you wonder if your application disappeared into the void.
What This Costs Us
This isn’t just annoying. It’s actively harmful.
When you promote and hire based on confidence instead of competence, you end up with leadership that’s great at presentations and terrible at decisions. You get technical debt because the confident person sold everyone on the quick solution instead of the right solution. You get toxic culture because confident assholes rise faster than competent humans.
You waste incredible talent. The competent people who don’t play the game either burn out, leave, or learn to become part of the problem. And when people see that performance matters more than results, they optimize for looking good instead of doing good work.
The actual work suffers. Innovation suffers. The people doing the work suffer.
But hey, at least the vibes are good.
Breaking the Addiction
So what do we do about this? I’d love to tell you there’s a simple fix, but we’ve built an entire industry around vibes. Dismantling that doesn’t happen overnight.
But here’s what helps:
Call it out. When someone’s confidently wrong, say so. Ask “how do you know that?” and “what’s your evidence?” Be the person who names the emperor’s lack of clothes.
Reward actual competence. If you’re in a position to hire or promote, look past the performance. Who’s actually getting shit done? Promote those people.
Document everything. You need receipts. They won’t notice otherwise.
Find the competent people and learn from them. They’re out there, quietly doing the actual work. Build relationships with them.
Stop rewarding bullshit. When a project fails because someone sold everyone on a bad idea, hold them accountable. Stop letting confident people fail upward.
Will any of this fix tech’s vibe addiction? Probably not entirely. But maybe we can create pockets of sanity where competence matters again.
The Bottom Line
Tech is addicted to vibes because vibes are easier than the messy, complicated work of actually evaluating competence. It’s easier to hire the person who interviews well than the person who’d be great at the job. It’s easier to promote the person who’s confident in meetings than the person who’s making everything work behind the scenes.
But easy doesn’t mean good.
We’ve built an industry that rewards confidence over competence, performance over results, and politics over skill. And we’re paying the price in bad software, toxic workplaces, and talented people who are fed up with the whole charade.
Maybe it’s time we admit we have a problem. Or we can just keep vibing until everything falls apart.
Your call, tech. But I wouldn’t bet on us choosing the hard thing.