…abstractions make the world manageable: simpler problem statements - free of reality - are much more analytically tractable and provided that we did not ignore anything essential, the solutions are widely applicable.

— Mikito Takada, Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit

One of the greatest urges of the newly minted manager is to actively “manage” their employees because that’s what a manager does, right? This typically has disastrous consequences.

— Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright, Software Engineering at Google

Whether a choice driven by these emotions is “rational” depends on whether you think that emotions are natural responses we should respect, like eating and staying warm, or evolutionary nuisances our rational powers should override.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Reality is not up to us.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

Legacy modernizations themselves are anti-patterns. A healthy organization running a healthy system should be able to evolve it over time without rerouting resources to a formal modernization effort.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire