Punishment and rewards are two sides of the same coin. Rewards have a punitive effect because they, like outright punishment, are manipulative. “Do this and you’ll get that” is not really very different from “Do this or here’s what will happen to you.” In the case of incentives, the reward itself may be highly desired; but by making that bonus contingent on certain behaviors, managers manipulate their subordinates, and that experience of being controlled is likely to assume a punitive quality over time.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Lots of people are proposing and advocating new software development processes, but hardly anyone is evaluating them.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, Software Creativity 2.0

Why is it that we reward programmers who work all night to remove the errors they put into their programs, or managers who make drastic organizational changes to resolve the crises their poor management has created? Why not reward the programmers who design so well that they don’t have dramatic errors, and managers whose organizations stay out of crisis mode?

— Gerald Weinberg, Becoming a Technical Leader

Most people can learn to write a simple program in a few hours. Human beings are extremely good at languages, even weird, grammatically constrained, abstract things like a programming languages. That isn’t the problem. In fact, the ease with which most people can pick up a few concepts that allows them to write a few lines of code is a different kind of problem altogether, in that it is sufficiently simple to lull people into a false sense of their own capabilities.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments.

— James Clear, Atomic Habits