…it isn’t possible to provide more precision than that shown in Table 8-12—it’s only possible to lie about it or not to know any better. The imprecision isn’t a sign of a bad estimate; it’s part of the nature of software development. Failure to acknowledge imprecision is a sign of a bad estimate.

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

One obvious injury done by accepting the Rational Model is that we mis-educate our successors. We teach them modes of working that we ourselves do not follow.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

Background Information: Rational Model

If you start dedicating even a couple of hours a week to developing the team around you, it’s quite likely that will become your legacy long after your tech specs and pull requests are forgotten.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer

Philosophy is on a higher plane than art or religion, which are still tied to “picture-thinking”.

— Lloyd Spencer, Introducing Hegel

one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?

— Scott Aaronson, Who Can Name the Bigger Number?