When organizations stop aiming for perfection and accept that all systems will occasionally fail, they stop letting their technology rot for fear of change and invest in responding faster to failure.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Code itself doesn’t bring value: it is the functionality that it provides that brings value.

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

…we feel that mentally ill people are not what we are looking for when we hire programmers—although there are no empirical data to support or contradict that view.

— Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

If your estimate is a date, you are really making a commitment, not an estimate.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship

In practice, “consumerism” often means “consumption by the other guy,” since the elites who condemn it tend themselves to be conspicuous consumers of exorbitant luxuries like hardcover books, good food and wine, live artistic performances, overseas travel, and Ivy-class education for their children.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now