Organizations don't optimize for correctness. They optimize for comfort. Not because of bad managers or stupid coworkers, but because that's how teams work.
You build the right thing. It gets validated. Then it gets overridden. Nobody disagrees with the technical argument, but accepting it costs more right now than ignoring it. Ignoring it costs more later, but later is someone else's problem.
I've watched this happen at every company I've worked at. Different teams, different bosses, different cultures, same pattern. The standard advice is always "communicate better, get buy-in, frame it differently." I've tried, and the outcomes don't change, because the problem isn't communication. It's structural.
Here are the mechanisms.
Comfort Over Correctness #
Fixing things creates disruption. Not fixing things is invisible until it breaks. Organizations pick invisible.
A code quality tool that tracks whether issues are accumulating or shrinking. One number, never measured before. It doesn't change rules or add warnings, just makes the existing count visible. One extra command when the count changes.
The person who admits they don't look at warnings votes against the tool. It gets removed before the trial period starts. The warnings keep accumulating, nobody notices, because nobody was looking. That was the problem the tool solved.
The cost of a small disruption is immediate and obvious. The cost of not fixing things shows up months later as a bug, an outage, a pattern nobody can trace back to any one decision. Every individual choice to go with comfort is defensible. The accumulated result is nobody's fault specifically. It just happens.
Correctness wins when the cost of ignoring it becomes impossible to miss: an outage, a customer complaint, data loss. Until then, comfort wins every time. The person trying to prevent the outage is "adding process." The outage itself is "unexpected."
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