…forecasting, especially when done with “science,” is often the last refuge of the charlatan, and has been so since the beginning of times.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

…an organization that allows any tool is an organization with uniformly unsupported tooling.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

“Behind every great fortune, there is a crime,” Balzac wrote. Except he didn’t. What he actually said was that a great fortune with no apparent cause was probably due to a crime well enough executed that it had been forgotten.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Industry data says that for the best software companies in the world, two-thirds of their ideas produce zero or negative value.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

It would seem that a large proportion of our population responds with [full] attention only to threatening experiences. . . These people brush aside experiences which are non-threatening and not dangerous, as therefore not being worthy of attention or any other response, cognitive or emotional. For them, life is either a meeting of dangers or a relaxation between dangers. But there are some people for whom this is not so. These are the people who will respond not only to dangerous situations. Probably feeling more safe and secure fundamentally, they can afford the luxury of responding to, noticing, and even thrilling with experiences which are not dangerous but pleasantly exciting.

— Abraham Maslow, Cognition of the Particular and the Generic