The payoffs that determine their reputations don’t coincide with the accuracy of the predictions, since no one is keeping score. Instead, their reputations hinge on their ability to entertain, titillate, or shock; on their ability to instill confidence or fear (in the hopes that a prophecy might be self-fulfilling or self-defeating); and on their skill in galvanizing a coalition and celebrating its virtue.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

We can’t give a perfect formula for deciding when it’s cheaper in the long term to import versus reimplement; we fail at this ourselves, more often than not.

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

Wishful thinking isn’t just optimism. It’s closing your eyes and hoping something works when you have no reasonable basis for thinking it will. Wishful thinking at the beginning of a project leads to big blowups at the end of a project. It undermines meaningful planning and may be at the root of more software problems than all other causes combined.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

DRY is excellent advice within the context of a single function, service, or module. It is good advice; beyond that, I would extend DRY to the scope of a version control repository or a deployment pipeline. It comes at a cost, though. Sometimes this is a very significant cost when applied between services or modules, particularly if they are developed independently. The problem is that the cost of having one canonical representation of any given idea across a whole system increases coupling, and the cost of coupling can exceed the cost of duplication.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules