Software Engineer Quotes

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Truth can only be found in one place: the code.

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.

Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.

A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.

Software engineers are sneaky bastards when it comes to data management.

It should be noted that no ethically -trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

The ideal architect should be a man of letters, a skillful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.

Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

If it hurts, do it more frequently, and bring the pain forward.

Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

Life of a software engineer can be summarized in twelve words – in right and left click, they live a life without any life.

Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one.

You must excuse my gruff conduct,” the watchdog said, after they’d been driving for some time, “but you see it’s traditional for watchdogs to be ferocious.

My definition of a great manager is someone with whom you can make a connection no matter where you sit in the organization chart.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.

Software testing is a sport like hunting, it's bughunting.

Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures.

A baseball manager recognizes a nonphysical talent, hustle, as an essential gift of great players and great teams. It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary. It is essential for great programming teams, too.

As time passes, the system becomes less and less well-ordered. Sooner or later the fixing cease to gain any ground. Each forward step is matched by a backward one. Although in principle usable forever, the system has worn out as a base for progress. ...A brand-new, from-the-ground-up redesign is necessary.

If it is not written down, it does not exist.

The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.

Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things. What a fucking rat race that is.

We should have suspected that nonhumans were involved right from the start when the activation process didn’t involve a lot of arcane commands that had to be done in just the right order, and the destination was displayed as a name rather than using some counterintuitive code. No human software engineer would produce a device that easy to use.

By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.

The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.

The challenge and the mission are to find real solutions to real problems on actual schedules with available resources.

Data scientist (noun): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician. — Josh Wills

Attracting a new scientist, software engineer, or mathematician to a city increases the demand for local services.

The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.

People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonald’s? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. That’s silly. When I first became a manager,

The conclusion is simple: if a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers, fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming.

For the human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation.

Albert Ellis: “The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour”. Apart

ARCHITECTS SHOULD FOCUS ON ENGINEERS AND OUTCOMES, NOT TOOLS OR TECHNOLOGIES

A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.

Heuristic is an algorithm in a clown suit. It’s less predictable, it’s more fun, and it comes without a 30-day, money-back guarantee.

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.

All race conditions, deadlock conditions, and concurrent update problems are due to mutable variables.

Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.

Of course!” Jack beamed. “Software engineers are sneaky bastards when it comes to data management.

The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.

Andy Weir built a career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian,

You wouldn't believe how many languages I had to learn to get my software engineering degree." Sam's gaze drifted over Daisy's Riot Grrrl T-shirt. "I see English wasn't one of them.

One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece of information to do their job.

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them (Fig. 2.1). This is true of reaping wheat or picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.

By documenting a design, the designer exposes himself to the criticisms of everyone, and he must be able to defend everything he writes. If the organizational structure is threatening in any way, nothing is going to be documented until it is completely defensible.

The software engineers who labored over the interface would have probably resorted to the standard lament: “RTFM”—“Read the (ahem) Manual.” For design thinkers, however, behaviors are never right or wrong, but they are always meaningful.

Life doesn't have a ctrl-z. Type wisely.

Quality must be enforced, otherwise it won't happen. We programmers must be required to write tests, otherwise we won't do it.

Life would be much easier if I had the source code.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion.

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding

Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.

In fact, flow charting is more preached than practiced. I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs

A software engineer named Tom kicks off, describing with great passion his relief at learning that there was “a physiological basis for the trait of sensitivity. Here’s the research! This is how I am! I don’t have to try to meet anyone’s expectations anymore. I

To me, Elon is the shining example of how Silicon Valley might be able to reinvent itself and be more relevant than chasing these quick IPOs and focusing on getting incremental products out,” said Edward Jung, a famed software engineer and inventor. “Those things are important, but they are not enough. We need to look at different models of how to do things that are longer term in nature and where the technology is more integrated.

The difference between a manager who knows what’s going on in an organization and one who is a purely politically driven slimeball is thin. But I would take either of those over some passive manager who lets the organization happen to him.

An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices—wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices. The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save—burned in one part, raw in another.

Today I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality. Having a system architect is the most important single step toward conceptual integrity. These principles are by no means limited to software systems, but to the design of any complex construct, whether a computer, an airplane, a Strategic Defense Initiative, a Global Positioning System. After teaching a software engineering laboratory more than 20 times, I came to insist that student teams as small as four people choose a manager and a separate architect. Defining distinct roles in such small teams may be a little extreme, but I have observed it to work well and to contribute to design success even for small teams.

A manager’s job is to transform his glaring deficiency into a strength by finding the best person to fill it and trusting him to do the job.

Formal mathematics is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your mathematics is.

The perfect kind of architecture decision is the one which never has to be made

Software development is neither a scientific nor an engineering task. It is an act of reality construction that is political and artistic.

Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

Thinking early in your career about how to help your co-workers succeed instills the right habits that in turn will lead to your own success.

Traditional managers worry about how to get things done, whereas great managers worry about what things get done (and trust their team to figure out how to do it).

This is what good management is about: 95% observation and listening, and 5% making critical adjustments in just the right place.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. Jorge Luis Borges

This is what makes them good engineers. Perfectionism: incinerating perfectionism.

We must not blame programmers for their bugs. They belong to them only until the code is merged to the repository. After that, all bugs are ours!

To be effective engineers, we need to be able to identify which activities produce more impact with smaller time investments.

We in the west think of unpredictability as a menace, something to be avoided at all costs. We want our careers, our family lives, our roads, our weather to be utterly predictable. We love nothing more than a sure thing. Shuffling the songs on our iPod is about as much randomness as we can handle. But here is a group of rational software engineers telling me that they like unpredictability, crave it, can’t live without it. I get an inkling, not for the first time, that India lies at a spiritual latitude beyond the reach of the science of happiness. At

Any software project must have a technical leader, who is responsible for all technical decisions made by the team and have enough authority to make them. Responsibility and authority are two mandatory components that must be present in order to make it possible to call such a person an architect.

he bragged that he’d written a million lines of code. Some employees thought that was preposterous. Sunny had worked at Microsoft, where teams of software engineers had written the Windows operating system at the rate of one thousand lines of code per year of development. Even if you assumed Sunny was twenty times faster than the Windows developers, it would still have taken him fifty years to do what he claimed.

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored.

In all other construction disciplines, engineers plan a construction strategy that craftmen execute. Engineers don't build bridges; ironworkers do. Only in software is the engineer tasked with actually building the product. Only in software is the "ironworker" tasked with determining how the product will be constructed.

the only reason anything good ships is because of the programmers. They are everything. They are not factory employees; they are craftspeople, craftspeople who are the fundamental creative engine of making software.

I once had a job where I didn't talk to anyone for two years. Here was the arrangement: I was the first engineer hired by a start-up software company. In exchange for large quantities of stock that might be worth something someday, I was supposed to give up my life.

Almost every software development organization has at least one developer who takes tactical programming to the extreme: a tactical tornado. The tactical tornado is a prolific programmer who pumps out code far faster than others but works in a totally tactical fashion. When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations, management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However, tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the tactical tornado.

Senior engineers can develop bad habits, and one of the worst is the tendency to lecture and debate with anyone who does not understand them or who disagrees with what they are saying. To work successfully with a newcomer or a more junior teammate, you must be able to listen and communicate in a way that person can understand, even if you have to try several times to get it right. Software development is a team sport in most companies, and teams have to communicate effectively to get anything done.

Businesses frequently prioritize new feature releases over fixing technical debt. They choose to work on revenue-generating work instead of revenue-protection work. This rarely works out as the business hopes, particularly as problems discovered during the final stages of uncompleted projects drag engineers away from the newer projects.

Working extra hours can hurt team dynamics. Not everyone on the team will have the flexibility to pitch in the extra hours. Perhaps one team member has children at home whom he has to take care of. Maybe someone else has a 2-week trip planned in the upcoming months, or she has to commute a long distance and can't work as many hours. Whereas once the team jelled together and everyone worked fairly and equally, now those who work more hours have to carry the weight of those who can't or don't. The result can be bitterness or resentment between members of a formerly-happy team.

These same people were required to be adept at software. They’d pull an all-nighter building a turbo pump for the engine and then dig in the next night to retool a suite of applications used to control the engines. Hollman did this type of work all the time and was an all-star, but he was not alone among this group of young, nimble engineers who crossed disciplines out of necessity and the spirit of adventure. “There was an almost addictive quality to the experience,” Hollman said. “You’re twenty-four or twenty-five, and they’re trusting you with so much. It was very empowering.” To get to space,

Life of a software engineer sucks big time during project release. Every single team member contribution is very important. At times, we have to skip breakfast, lunch and even dinner, just to make sure the given ‘TASK’ is completed. Worst thing, that’s the time we get to hear wonderful F* words. It can be on conference calls or on emails, still we have to focus and deliver the end product to a client, without any compromise on quality. Actually, every techie should be saluted. We are the reason for the evolution of Information Technology. We innovate. We love artificial intelligence. We create bots and much more. We take you closer to books. Touch and feel it without the need of carrying a paperback. We created eBook and eBook reader app: it’s basically a code of a software engineer that process the file, keeps up-to-date of your reading history, and gives you a smoother reading experience. We are amazing people. We are more than a saint of those days. Next time, when you meet a software engineer, thank him/her for whatever code he/she developed, tested, designed or whatever he/she did!

Robotics, however, is much more difficult. It requires a delicate interplay of mechanical engineering, perception AI, and fine-motor manipulation. These are all solvable problems, but not at nearly the speed at which pure software is being built to handle white-collar cognitive tasks. Once that robot is built, it must also be tested, sold, shipped, installed, and maintained on-site. Adjustments to the robot’s underlying algorithms can sometimes be made remotely, but any mechanical hiccups require hands-on work with the machine. All these frictions will slow down the pace of robotic automation.

I want my crew back.' Arada's brows lifted, like she was relieved it wasn't something worse. "What happened to them?" 'The hostiles stole them, forced me to cooperate by threatening their welfare, infected my engines with interdicted alien remnant technology, installed adversarial software, and then deleted me.' I was still mad, right? But there were a lot of keywords there that invoked involuntary responses. Thiago kept his expression neutral. "Then how are you talking to us if--" 'I saved a backup copy and hid it where only a trusted friend could find it.' I was looking at the wall, watching everyone and the display with Amena's drones. Trusted friend? "Oh, fuck you." 'That still counts as speaking.

In the mid-1990s, a new employee of Sun Microsystems in California kept disappearing from their database. Every time his details were entered, the system seemed to eat him whole; he would disappear without a trace. No one in HR could work out why poor Steve Null was database kryptonite. The staff in HR were entering the surname as “Null,” but they were blissfully unaware that, in a database, NULL represents a lack of data, so Steve became a non-entry. To computers, his name was Steve Zero or Steve McDoesNotExist. Apparently, it took a while to work out what was going on, as HR would happily reenter his details each time the issue was raised, never stopping to consider why the database was routinely removing him.

As black-box technologies become more widespread, there have been no shortage of demands for increased transparency. In 2016 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation included in its stipulations the "right to an explanation," declaring that citizens have a right to know the reason behind the automated decisions that involve them. While no similar measure exists in the United States, the tech industry has become more amenable to paying lip service to "transparency" and "explainability," if only to build consumer trust. Some companies claim they have developed methods that work in reverse to suss out data points that may have triggered the machine's decisions—though these explanations are at best intelligent guesses. (Sam Ritchie, a former software engineer at Stripe, prefers the term "narratives," since the explanations are not a step-by-step breakdown of the algorithm's decision-making process but a hypothesis about reasoning tactics it may have used.) In some cases the explanations come from an entirely different system trained to generate responses that are meant to account convincingly, in semantic terms, for decisions the original machine made, when in truth the two systems are entirely autonomous and unrelated. These misleading explanations end up merely contributing another layer of opacity. "The problem is now exacerbated," writes the critic Kathrin Passig, "because even the existence of a lack of explanation is concealed.

Still allergic to PowerPoints and formal presentations, he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments. Because he believed that Apple's great advantage was its integration of the whole widget- from design to hardware to software to content-he wanted all departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used were "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering." Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. " Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative," Jobs said. This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top leaders-Cook, Tevanian, Schiller, Rubinstein, Ive- rather than just the managers of the department where they wanted to work. " Then we all get together without the person and talk about whether they'll fit in," Jobs said.

Lilah did little more than sleep and eat and cry, which to me was the most fascinating thing in the entire universe. Why did she cry? When did she sleep? What made her eat a lot one day and little the next? Was she changing with time? I did what any obsessed person would do in such a case: I recorded data, plotted it, calculated statistical correlations. First I just wrote on scraps of paper and made charts on graph paper, but I very quickly became more sophisticated. I wrote computer software to make a beautifully colored plot showing times when Diane fed Lilah, in black; when I fed her, in blue (expressed mother's milk, if you must know); Lilah's fussy times, in angry red; her happy times, in green. I calculated patterns in sleeping times, eating times, length of sleep, amounts eaten. Then, I did what any obsessed person would do these days; I put it all on the Web.

We've known each other for years." "In every sense of the word." Tanya gave him a nudge and they shared another laugh. In every sense of the word... Daisy felt a cold stab of jealousy at their intimate moment. It didn't make sense. Her relationship with Liam wasn't real. But the more time she spent with him, the more the line blurred and she didn't know where she stood. "Daisy is a senior software engineer for an exciting new start-up that's focused on menstrual products," Liam said. "She's in line for a promotion to product manager. The company couldn't run without her." Daisy grimaced. "I think that's a bit of an exaggeration." "Take the compliment," Tanya said. "Liam doesn't throw many around... At least, he didn't used to." At least, he didn't used to... Was the bitch purposely trying to goad her with little reminders about her shared past with Liam? Daisy's teeth gritted together. Well, she got the message. Tanya was a cool, bike-riding, smooth-haired venture capitalist ex who clearly wasn't suffering in any way after her journey. She was probably so tough she didn't need any padding in her seat. Maybe she just sat on a board or the bare steel frame. Liam ran a hand through his hair, ruffling the dark waves into a sexy tangle. Was he subconsciously grooming himself for Tanya? Or was he just too warm? "What are you riding now?" "Triumph Street Triple 675. I got rid of the Ninja. Not enough power." "You like the naked styling?" Liam asked. Tanya smirked. "Naked is my thing, as you know too well." Naked is my thing... As you know too well... Daisy tried to shut off the snarky voice in her head, but something about Tanya set her possessive teeth on edge. "Do you want to join us inside?" Liam asked. "We're going to have a coffee before we finish the loop." Say no. Say no. Say no. "Sounds good." Tanya took a few steps and looked back over her shoulder. "Do you need a hand, Daisy?" Only to slap you.

Take for example job applications. In the 21st century the decision wherever to hire somebody for a job while increasingly be made by algorithms. We cannot rely on the machines to set the relevant ethical standards, humans will still need to do that, but once we decide on an ethical standard in the job market, that it is wrong to discriminate against blacks or against women for example, we can rely on machines to implement and maintain these standards better than humans. A human manager may know and even agree that is unethical to discriminate against blacks and women but then when a black woman applies for a job the manager subconsciously discriminate against her and decides not to hire her. If we allow a computer to evaluate job applications and program computers to completely ignore race and gender we can be certain that the computer will indeed ignore these factors because computers do not have a subconscious. Of course it won't be easy to write code for evaluating job applications and there is always the danger that the engineers will somehow program their own subconscious biases into the software, yet once we discover such mistakes it would probably be far easier to debug the software than to get rid humans of their racist and misogynist biases.

After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by pre-rich and post-rich technology people and the new category of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as, living among tie-wearing abhorrent bankers, I had developed the illusion that anyone who doesn’t wear a tie was not an empty suit. But these conferences, while colorful and slick with computerized images and fancy animations, felt depressing. I knew I did not belong. It was not just their additive approach to the future (failure to subtract the fragile rather than add to destiny). It was not entirely their blindness by uncompromising neomania. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance. Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture. This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past—properly handled, as we will see in the next section—is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his first mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake. Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.” Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate. Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something; sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both. Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.) Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.