Very successful companies have never struck me as particularly busy; in fact, they are, as a group, rather laid-back. Energy is evident in the workplace, but it’s not the energy tinged with fear that comes from being slightly behind on everything.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

Avoid at all cost hiring individuals who are deeply cynical. They can poison a development team and create havoc in your organization by sowing dissension and dissatisfaction where those feelings might otherwise never grow.

— Mickey W. Mantle and Ron Lichty, Managing the Unmanageable

The point there was that fragmenting any knowledge worker’s time over many different tasks assures that he or she will be thrust into two or more different work groups, none of which is likely to jell into a real team.

— Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, Peopleware

My impression is that good design receives more lip service than any other activity in software development and that few developers really do design at all. A design architect who works for Microsoft said that in 6 years of interviewing more than 200 candidates for software-development positions, he had interviewed only 5 who could accurately describe the concepts of “modularity” and “information hiding”

— Steve McConnell, Rapid Development

…he could force the people in his group into “good behavior,” such as being less argumentative, the result would be losing much of the creative manic energy for which he hired those people.

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs