You can't have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.

Great software needs functional humans first

Most of us have experienced that weird moment when a workplace suddenly feels less like a job and more like a family drama. Someone takes credit for your idea. Meetings become therapy sessions where people air old grudges. There's an unspoken hierarchy that has nothing to do with the org chart. McCarthy's observation cuts deep because software teams aren't uniquely dysfunctional—they're just more visible. When your work is literally building something that either works or doesn't, the cracks in team dynamics become impossible to hide.

The uncomfortable truth is that high stakes actually make dysfunction worse, not better. People working on genuinely hard problems under time pressure tend to regress into defensive behaviors. The person who should speak up stays quiet. The natural leader doesn't lead. Instead of pooling intelligence, teams fragment into silos of blame and protection. And here's the thing nobody says out loud: you can't engineer your way out of this. You can't architecture or code around a team that doesn't actually function.

That's why McCarthy's point matters. Great software requires not just smart people, but people who can think clearly together, admit mistakes without losing face, and make collective decisions that stick. Building that takes intention and vulnerability—the exact opposite of how most high-pressure teams actually operate.