He means the same thing Kelly Johnson did: if something is ugly, it can’t be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone else will discover it.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

If just one or two engineers are getting something wrong, adding to everyone’s mental load by creating new rules doesn’t scale.

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

Many of the dramas of human social life—the sagas of sympathy, trust, favor, debt, revenge, gratitude, guilt, shame, treachery, gossip, reputation—may be understood as the playing of strategies in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

Teaching a company to value something it doesn’t care about is the hardest sort of work you can do, and it often fails, so you should do as little of it as you can, but no less.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

Simple does not mean easy. Simple means untangled, and untangling things is hard.

— Robert C. Martin, Clean Craftsmanship