Marx is the prophet, Marcuse is his interpreter, and Mao is the sword.

— Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism

…the qualities that make somebody a well-functioning human being and the qualities that make somebody a really good programmer—they overlap but they don’t overlap a whole heck of a lot.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

W. Edwards Deming once observed, ‘a bad system will beat a good person every time.’

— Gene Kim, The Unicorn Project

…in a field as complex and young as computing and data processing, there is massive ignorance and therefore massive ambiguity in doing our job. We really don’t know a best way to build software; it is unlikely we are going to find such a way in the near future.

— Robert L. Glass and Tom DeMarco, Software Creativity 2.0

…just as the retinues of a feudal lord might include servants whose only role was to polish his horses’ armor or tweeze his mustache before tournaments or pageants, so may present-day executives keep employees whose sole purpose is to prepare their PowerPoint presentations or craft the maps, cartoons, photographs, or illustrations that accompany their reports.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs