Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Inadequate Equilibria

Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

SOFTWARE MANAGERS AND DEVELOPERS ARE DRAWN TO productivity tools like ants to a picnic, children to mud puddles, and late-night TV lawyers to auto accidents. Sometimes they’re drawn to productivity tools the way that drunken sailors are drawn to the sirens’ call.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

If you can get today’s work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can’t possibly get tomorrow’s work done tomorrow, then you lose.

— Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, Don Roberts, and Erich Gamma, Refactoring

Accumulating technical debt isn’t necessarily harmful—it can help projects move along faster in the short term—but it should be done as a conscientious observer, not as an unaware boiling frog.

— Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann, Super Thinking