engineering leadership

• It is probable that the future will be more limited by the slow evolution of the human animal and the corresponding human laws, social institutions, and organizations than it will be by the rapid evolution of technology.

  — Richard Hamming

• I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.

  — Paul Graham

• People who understand their collective goals and values are pretty good at self-organizing -- as long as they are allowed to.

  — Ward Cunningham

• Technical people don’t make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

  — Vernor Vinge

• It was a turning point in my programming career when I realized that I didn't have to win every argument.

  — Ward Cunningham

• You can't control what you can't measure

  — Tom DeMarco

• Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

  — Steve Jobs

• It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life.

  — Richard Feynman

• The fact that this danger did not lead to a catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next time, unless it is completely understood. When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next.

  — Richard Feynman

• There's a special word for bosses who care about their employees: unemployed.

  — Scott Adams

• The extreme difficulty of scaling production of new technology is not well understood. It’s 1000% to 10,000% harder than making a few prototypes. The machine that makes the machine is vastly harder than the machine itself.

  — Elon Musk

• If we look at the discipline of software engineering, we see that the microeconomics branch of economics deals more with the types of decisions we need to make as software engineers or managers.

  — Barry Boehm

• Ideas hate conference rooms

  — Bassel Khartabil

• When you’ve had something for ten years that you hold so precious, it’s the toughest thing in the world to hand it over. And the only advice I can give you is, find somebody better than you to hand it to.

  — Randy Pausch

• The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.

  — Jeff Bezos

• 95: Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.

  — Alan Perlis

• If you try to improve the performance of a system of people, machines, and procedures by setting numerical goals for the improvement of individual parts of the system, the system will defeat your efforts and you will pay a price where you least expect it.

  — Myron Tribus

• It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.

  — Freeman Dyson

• A horrifying amount of "business engineering" is done with the wrong strategic vision. A horrifying amount of IT development is done with the wrong business design.

  — James Martin

• Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.

  — Elon Musk