Confidence isn’t loud. It’s the quiet refusal to perform competence for people who weren’t going to believe you anyway.

The loudest person in a technical meeting is rarely the one who built the system being discussed. I noticed this pattern years before I could name it. During Curiosity’s first weeks on Mars in August 2012, we hit a flash memory anomaly that threatened to delay the rover’s first drive. The fault protection system had triggered a swap to redundant memory, and the team had a narrow window to diagnose the cause before the next planning cycle. The engineer who had actually written the fault protection...