The 10th Person: Why Tech Needs More Contrarians Who Actually Think

In World War Z, Israel survives the zombie apocalypse because of a simple rule: if nine intelligence officials agree on something, the tenth must assume they're all wrong and explore alternatives. Not to be difficult. Not to play devil's advocate. But because consensus is dangerous and groupthink kills.

I've spent my career being that tenth person. The one questioning why we need Kubernetes for a service with three endpoints. The one asking if we really need to rewrite the whole thing in Rust. The one mapping out what happens when your "temporary workaround" becomes permanent infrastructure that nobody understands.

People think I'm being difficult. I'm not. I'm being the 10th person.

Consensus is a Red Flag

When everyone in the room agrees, someone isn't thinking. They're following. They're deferring. They're nodding along because it's easier than asking the question that makes them look stupid.

Let's use microservices. We should add GraphQL. This needs to be event-driven.

Nobody asks why. Nobody maps the decision three moves ahead. Nobody considers what happens when the junior engineer who built this quits and we're left maintaining a distributed system that could've been a monolith with a cron job.

The 10th person asks those questions. Not because they're smarter. Because they're wired differently.

The Autism Advantage

I'm autistic. That means I can't not see the decision tree. When you propose a solution, my brain immediately forks into every possible timeline:

What if this scales? What if it doesn't? What happens when the database fills up? What happens when the cache gets stale? What happens when the person who wrote this leaves? What happens when we need to debug this at 3 AM?

Most people see one path forward. I see thirteen. Most people are surprised by outcomes. I'm not. I've already lived them in my head before we wrote a single line of code.

This isn't a superpower. It's fucking exhausting and I can't just turn it off. But it's also why I'm good at being the 10th person. I can't ignore the futures everyone else hasn't considered yet.

Question Everything, Especially the Easy Stuff

The hardest part of being the 10th person isn't questioning big decisions. It's questioning the small ones. The "obvious" ones. The ones where everyone assumes there's only one right answer.

We'll just add a new service for that. We'll just add another dependency. We'll just patch it later.

No. Stop. Why? Why do we need another service? Why can't the existing one handle this? Why are we optimizing for convenience over maintainability? Why are we assuming future-us will have more time than present-us?

These aren't rhetorical questions. They're the 10th person protocol. Assume the consensus is wrong. Map the alternatives. Force the room to think instead of react.

It's Not Contrarianism, It's Discipline

Being the 10th person isn't about being contrarian for sport. It's not about saying "no" to everything. It's about disciplined skepticism. It's about recognizing that the path of least resistance is usually the path to technical debt, production outages, and systems nobody understands.

When I question your design, I'm not attacking you. I'm stress-testing the decision. I'm forcing us to articulate why this is the right call instead of just the easiest one. If you can defend it, great. We move forward with confidence. If you can't, we just saved ourselves months of regret.

Don't Waste My Time If You Just Want Agreement

Here's what pisses me off: teams that bring me in, ask for my input, and then get upset when I don't just nod along. They don't want the 10th person. They want a rubber stamp.

If you already decided on the solution and you're just looking for validation, don't waste my time. Use some fucking LLM. It'll tell you your idea is great. It'll suggest some optimizations. It'll never ask "why are we doing this at all?"

That's not what I'm here for. When you pull me into a meeting, a design review, or a code review you're asking me to map the decision tree. To consider the futures you haven't thought about. To question the assumptions you're making. That's the job. That's what my brain does whether I want it to or not.

But if you've already made up your mind? If you're just checking a box so you can say you "got feedback"? Then you're wasting both our time. Mine, because I'm going to give you real feedback anyway. Yours, because you're going to ignore it and then act surprised six months later when everything I predicted comes true.

So here's the deal: if you want agreement, go find it somewhere else. There are plenty of people who will tell you what you want to hear. There are infinite blog posts that will validate your choices. There are LLMs that will generate enthusiastic affirmations on demand.

But if you want the 10th person and you actually want someone to stress-test your thinking then bring me in. But don't get mad when I do the job.

And here's the brutal truth... If this happens again and again I will do what the 10th person should be doing, but I won't tell anyone. I will prepare for the inevitable future to protect my own mental health when there comes a time when the brilliant, clever, or lazy decision crashes at midnight.

The Room Needs a 10th Person

Most teams don't have one. They have nine people who all think the same way, went to the same bootcamps, read the same blog posts, and worship the same thought leaders. They add complexity because everyone else is doing it. They chase trends because nobody wants to be the one who didn't adopt the hot new framework.

That's how you end up with a "simple CRUD app" running on Kubernetes with a service mesh, an event bus, three databases, and a deployment pipeline that takes 40 minutes. Someone needed to be the 10th person. Someone needed to ask "why" before it was too late.

How to Be the 10th Person

You don't need to be autistic. You don't need to see thirteen futures. You just need discipline:

• Assume consensus is wrong. If nine people agree, somebody isn't thinking.
• Map the decision tree. Don't just ask "will this work?" Ask "what happens when it doesn't?"
• Question the small stuff. Big decisions get scrutiny. Small ones compound into disasters.
• Force articulation. Make people explain their reasoning out loud. If they can't, the decision isn't ready.
• Accept the discomfort. Being the 10th person is lonely. Do it anyway.

In Closing

Tech doesn't need more consensus. It needs more 10th people. People who question the defaults. People who map the futures everyone else ignores. People who have the discipline to say "wait, why are we doing this?" even when it's easier to just nod along.

I've been that person my whole career. It's made me difficult to work with sometimes. It's also made me right more often than I'm wrong.

So be difficult. Be the 10th person. Because if everyone agrees, someone isn't thinking.

Also, Happy Friday the 13th!