In tech, we celebrate success stories with near-religious zeal. Startup exits, viral products, clever hacks that “went global.” But the truth is: for every one success, there are a hundred quiet failures — projects abandoned, ideas shelved, teams burned out.
Failure in our field isn’t rare. It’s invisible.
People don’t blog about the product that never launched or the refactor that imploded. They don’t post screenshots of burnout or screenshots of lost weekends debugging a single API call. Yet those moments shape us more than any success ever could.
Failure teaches humility, resilience, and empathy — things no tutorial covers. The irony is, the more experienced a developer becomes, the less they talk about success. Because they’ve seen too much of the other side.
We need a culture where it’s normal to say, “That didn’t work,” without shame. Failure isn’t the opposite of progress; it is progress, just wearing the wrong badge.
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