My view of the current state of the art in our research is that it involves a lot of definition, a lot of explanation, a lot of advocacy, and very little evidence to support that advocacy.

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

The time you spend honing your development skills, such as seeing patterns in code, refactoring code to be easier to maintain or extend, and writing tests does little to prepare skills in resolving conflict, establishing a team culture, or communicating technology in ways that non-technical people can understand.

— Patrick Kua, Talking With Tech Leads

…what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself — as though that were so necessary — that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

Conway’s law has become a voodoo curse—something that people believe only in retrospect. Few engineers attribute their architecture successes to the structures of their organizations, but when a product is malformed, the explanation of Conway’s law is easily accepted.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Poor managers create the illusion of productivity through busy-ness. Average managers finish work (but not always the right work). Great managers accomplish goals and develop people.

— Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby, Behind Closed Doors