Science & Tech Quote by Theo de Raadt

A lesser industry can pretend that “quality” and profit naturally converge; Theo de Raadt is calling out tech’s favorite bedtime story. The line lands with the deadpan certainty of someone who’s watched the same mistake ship, patch, and ship again: in computing, the market often rewards speed, lock-in, and marketing momentum more reliably than it rewards software that is durable, secure, and thoughtfully engineered.

The phrasing is doing work. “In some industry markets” nods to the comforting idea that craftsmanship can be monetized. Then comes the snap: “but... the computer industry is not like that.” It’s not just critique, it’s an indictment of incentives. De Raadt’s subtext is that code quality is frequently treated as an externality - something the user pays for later in breaches, outages, and technical debt - while vendors bank the upside now. “I am sure by now all of us know” is a small knife twist: if you’re still surprised, you haven’t been paying attention.

Context matters because de Raadt isn’t a neutral observer; he’s the OpenBSD founder, famous for security-first minimalism and for publicly shaming sloppy practices. Read through that lens, the quote becomes a defense of a particular ethos: building systems that resist failure even when the spreadsheet says it’s inefficient. It also hints at the quiet tragedy of infrastructure work: the better it is, the less visible it becomes, and the harder it is to sell. In tech, quality is often what you only miss after it’s gone.