You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something. It’s possible to be one without the other…

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

“Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative: they have led to life-saving medicines, the internet, more efficient energy storage, and digital entertainment; they also have shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, electronic eavesdropping, and damage to the environment.” Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and inspired the Nazis, and so on.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

“You get the culture you pay for.” As we work on technology migration with enterprises, it’s usually people and processes that are the blockers, not technology problems.

— Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud

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