When an engineer with years of familiarity in a problem space begins designing a product, it’s easy to imagine a utopian end-state for the work. However, it’s important to differentiate aspirational goals of the product from minimum success criteria (or Minimum Viable Product). Projects can lose credibility and fail by promising too much

— Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy, Site Reliability Engineering

Well-integrated, high-functioning software that is easy to understand usually blends in. Simple solutions do not do much to enhance one’s personal brand. They are rarely worth talking about. Therefore, when an organization provides no pathway to promotion for software engineers, they are incentivized to make technical decisions that emphasize their individual contribution over integrating well into an existing system.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.

— Robert Wright, The Evolution of God

For medium number systems, we can expect that large fluctuations, irregularities, and discrepancy with any theory will occur more or less regularly.

— Gerald Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

…our immediate response to the difficulty of facing the lies and falsehoods of our dearest friends and family members: to try to isolate falsehoods and lies and to limit them to our opposite number, the rich (if we are poor), the poor (if we are rich), Republicans (if we are Democrats), Democrats (if we are Republicans), etc., etc. We pretend that others are indeed swallowed by lies, but we ourselves have escaped. We imagine that our social class or group allows us special access to truth.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought