“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

…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