The most feared situation is to end up inadvertently in the wrong place at the wrong time and get blamed. Yet this is exactly what happens in a structure that systematically diffuses responsibility. It is because managers fear blame-time that they diffuse responsibility; however such a diffusion inevitably means that someone, somewhere is going to become a scapegoat when things go wrong.

— Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes

One of the most difficult things to do as a TL is to watch a more junior team member spend 3 hours working on something that you know you can knock out in 20 minutes.

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

“Business people can see features or apps, so getting funding for those is easy,” he continues. “But they don’t see the vast architectures underneath that support them, connecting systems, teams, and data to each other. And underneath that is something extraordinarily important: the systems that developers use in their daily work to be productive.

— Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project

When people say, “It’s inevitable that a large program will have bugs,” they don’t mean inevitable in the sense, “It’s inevitable that cars will have accidents.” What they mean is, “We don’t have the proper software engineering techniques to root out all defects so we’re not even going to attempt to remove them all—and we’re not going to improve the techniques either.”

— Adam Barr, The Problem with Software

Since failure can arise from many causes, product processes typically demand consensus by many people, each expert in a separate cause of potential failure. Such consensus stifles great design in several ways. First, each expert watchdog is paid to avoid mistakes, not to make great things happen.

— Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Design of Design