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Quote of the Day

If you enjoy programming, philosophy, math, or any number of geeky topics, you're in the right place. Every day, I'll post a random quote from my extensive collection of Kindle highlights. Quotes do not necessarily reflect my views or opinions. In fact, part of my epistemic process is to consume a wide variety of contradictory material.

05/08/2020

The most feared situation is to end up inadvertently in the wrong place at the wrong time and get blamed. Yet this is exactly what happens in a structure that systematically diffuses responsibility. It is because managers fear blame-time that they diffuse responsibility; however such a diffusion inevitably means that someone, somewhere is going to become a scapegoat when things go wrong.

— Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes

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05/06/2020

“Business people can see features or apps, so getting funding for those is easy,” he continues. “But they don’t see the vast architectures underneath that support them, connecting systems, teams, and data to each other. And underneath that is something extraordinarily important: the systems that developers use in their daily work to be productive.

— Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project

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05/05/2020

When people say, “It’s inevitable that a large program will have bugs,” they don’t mean inevitable in the sense, “It’s inevitable that cars will have accidents.” What they mean is, “We don’t have the proper software engineering techniques to root out all defects so we’re not even going to attempt to remove them all—and we’re not going to improve the techniques either.”

— Adam Barr, The Problem with Software

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