When a database falls over at 3 a.m., most engineers assume they are solving a purely technical problem. They are also, whether they intend to or not, drafting the next paragraph of their company's public story. The careful, deeply human discipline once confined to a communications team — the kind of work explored in this clear-eyed look at the human side of corporate reputation and why businesses still need PR — has quietly seeped into status pages, commit logs, and incident channels. For anyone shipping software in 2026, managing how the outside world perceives a company is no longer a job that lives somewhere downstream of the code. It happens in the code, and in how you talk about that code when it breaks.
When trust turned into an engineering metric
For most of the last century, a company's reputation was something the marketing floor manufactured and the public consumed at a distance. That arrangement has collapsed. Today people judge organizations far less by what they say and far more by how their products behave under pressure — how an app handles a failed payment, how a service explains an outage, how a vendor treats your data after you've stopped paying attention.
The stakes are not soft. In its widely cited piece Reputation and Its Risks, the Harvard Business Review pointed out that the overwhelming majority of a modern company's market value sits in intangible assets — brand, goodwill, trust — rather than in factories or inventory. That share has only grown since. And the levers that move those intangibles are increasingly technical: latency, uptime, a clean security disclosure, a sane data-retention policy. Meanwhile, faith in the sector is fragile. Edelman's annual Trust Barometer found that confidence in technology companies among Americans has slipped from roughly three-quarters a decade ago to under two-thirds today. Every engineering decision now lands somewhere on that ledger.
The postmortem is the new press release
Nowhere is this clearer than in how teams respond to failure. A generation ago, an outage was something to bury. Now the public incident report is a genre of its own, and the best examples read like an act of respect toward the reader. Google's site reliability engineers helped formalize the playbook with their writing on blameless postmortem culture, which insists you investigate the system that allowed a mistake rather than hunt for someone to punish. The technical payoff is more reliable software. The reputational payoff is just as large: a postmortem written with candor and specificity tells customers that the people behind the product are honest and competent.
The contrast plays out publicly all the time. When GitLab accidentally wiped a chunk of production data in 2017, it documented the recovery in near real time and published an unflinching account of what went wrong. That transparency did more for its standing than any campaign could have. Compare it with companies that meet a crisis with vague, lawyered statements and the silence of a frozen status page. Part of what made the 2024 CrowdStrike update — the one that grounded flights and stalled hospital systems — so corrosive was not only the bug itself, but the scramble to explain it afterward. How you communicate failure is now part of the product.
Small signals, enormous perceptions
Most reputation work, though, is invisible and constant. It lives in the tiny interactions developers rarely think of as communication at all. An error message that blames the user versus one that helps them. A changelog that respects people's time versus a wall of "minor bug fixes." A deprecation notice that gives integrators a fair runway versus one that breaks their weekend. A reply to an open-source issue that's curt versus one that's generous. Each of these is a micro-broadcast, and collectively they decide whether people describe your software as trustworthy or hostile.
This is the part a marketing department genuinely cannot do for you. Tone, honesty, and follow-through at the level of an API response or a pull-request comment are authored by engineers, in the moment, usually without an editor. That is precisely why the human dimension of reputation — empathy, clarity, the willingness to own a mistake — has become a core engineering skill rather than a soft afterthought.
What developers can actually do about it
You don't need a communications title to take this seriously. A few habits go a long way:
- Write error messages for a frightened human, not for the logs — say what happened, what it means, and what to do next.
- Treat postmortems as published documents, even internal ones, because clarity now prevents folklore later.
- Default to plain language in changelogs and deprecation notices, and give people real lead time before you break their integration.
- Answer issues and reviews as if a future hire is reading them, because one probably is.
- Flag the reputational angle early when a fix touches user data or downtime, so the right people can speak honestly and fast.
Reputation is a shared repository
The most useful way to frame all of this is that reputation behaves like a codebase the whole organization commits to. No single person owns it, every change is logged somewhere public, and the small, careless commits accumulate into technical debt that someone eventually has to pay down — often at the worst possible moment. Engineers happen to push to that repository more often than anyone else does.
None of this asks developers to become spin doctors. It asks for the opposite: that the honesty and rigor you already bring to a system design extend to the words wrapped around it. The organizations people trust over the long run are rarely the ones with the loudest campaigns. They are the ones whose software behaves with integrity when it's under strain — and whose engineers, when something breaks, choose to explain rather than hide. That choice is yours far more often than you think.
