The more successful a company is in extracting every bit of capacity from its workers, the more it exposes itself to turnover and attendant human capital loss.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

But what is happiness except a simple harmony between man and the life he leads?

— Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

Strong managers don’t care when team members cut their hair or whether they wear ties. Their pride is tied only to their staff’s accomplishments.

— Tom DeMarco, Tim Lister, Peopleware

Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time. This will become ever more clear as computers get faster.

— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

The introduction of information theory and its applications to thermodynamics has led to the conclusion that entropy, a basic concept of that science, is a measure of the observer’s ignorance of the atomic details of the system.

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I