Science & Tech Quote by Niklaus Wirth

Wirth’s line lands like a cold splash of water on an industry that loves to buy its way out of difficulty. He refuses the comforting story that software collapses because we picked the wrong framework, failed to “align stakeholders,” or didn’t hold enough standups. The target is managerial theater and tool-worship: the belief that better process can compensate for weak engineering fundamentals. By naming “technical competence” as the central deficit, he pulls the discussion back to first principles - the unglamorous work of understanding complexity, correctness, and constraints.

The subtext is a rebuke to modern software culture’s incentives. Tools are easy to market, easy to adopt, easy to point to in postmortems. Competence is slow, expensive, and hard to measure, especially at scale. Wirth implies that organizations often prefer legibility over truth: a new toolchain produces the appearance of progress; genuine expertise produces fewer hero narratives and fewer shiny announcements.

Context matters. Wirth isn’t a pundit; he helped shape how programming is taught and practiced, from Pascal to Modula and a broader ethos of disciplined simplicity. His worldview treats software engineering less as an “industry” and more as an engineering profession with standards, rigor, and personal responsibility. Read that way, the quote isn’t nostalgia for a simpler era; it’s a warning about what happens when software becomes infrastructure while the people building it are trained like consumers. When competence is the bottleneck, every new tool just helps you make mistakes faster.