Quotes by Software Engineers

Programming is a social activity.
Robert C. Martin
As the days and weeks and seasons wore on he found himself repeating this nothing, not wanting to. Gradually he came to understand that this particular nothing was all that he could really say now. He chanted it to himself in cell blocks and dingy apartments, recited it like a litany, ripped himself to rags against the sharp and ugly poetry of it. It echoed down the grimy hallways and squandered moments of his life, the answer to every question, the lyric of all songs.
Scott Hawkins
One thing I have in abundance here are bags. They're not much different than kitchen trash bags, though I'm sure they cost $50,000 because of NASA.
Andy Weir
Mars is not Earth. It doesn't have a thick atmosphere to bend light and carry particles that reflect light around corners. It's damn near a vacuum here. Once the sun isn't visible, I'm in the dark. Phobos gives me some moonlight, but not enough to work with. Deimos is a little piece of crap that's no good to anyone.
Andy Weir
When stress is the problem, slack is the solution.
Tom DeMarco
The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash.
Tom DeMarco
Managers who inspire extraordinary loyalty from their people tend to be highly charismatic, humorous, good-looking, and tall. So, by all means, strive to be those things. If you don't feel able to improve any of those factors very much, you might consider holding on to your people by designing a little slack into their lives.
Tom DeMarco
Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.
Tom DeMarco
Any vigorous competition will entail at least two elements: offense and defense. Offense is the effort you put into scoring against your opponents, and defense is the effort you apply to stop them from scoring against you. Those who suggest that "a little healthy competition can't hurt" are thinking only of the offense part....The offense component of internal competition is problematic, but the defense component is always injurious. When peer managers play defense against each other (try to stop each other from scoring), they are engaging in anticooperation.
Tom DeMarco
If the essential task of middle managers is reinvention, when is that task to be carried out? The answer is, during time that is not used up directing day-to-day business. The fact that managers have time on their hands (i.e., their operations tasks take up less than eight hours per day) gives them time for reinvention. The extra time is not waste, but slack. Without it they could function in only their operational roles. Reinvention would be impossible because the people who could make it happen are just too busy to take the time.Even companies that didn't fire their change centers have hurt themselves by encouraging their middle managers to stay extremely busy. In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.
Tom DeMarco
There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative.
Tom DeMarco
Everyone on the Internet is talking about television and everyone on television is talking about the Internet. The whole damn thing is a self-licking ice cream cone and you're blaming me?
Daniel Suarez
They’re called sock puppets. We create armies of artificial online personas – user accounts that espouse views certain interested parties want espoused. We flood forums, online comment sections, social media. ... It’s amazing what a few people and a little money can accomplish online. Our puppets have turned whole elections. … Everything the public sees is managed. If there’s a valuable brand to protect – whether it’s a person or a dish soap – these fuckers are out there protecting it, shaping the narrative. I mean… who the hell follows dish soap on Twitter? How does anyone believe that shit’s real? (p. 292-294)
Daniel Suarez
The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
Eric Schmidt
In the Library you took your good times where you could find them.
Scott Hawkins
If I could have anything, it would be a radio to ask NASA the safe path down the Ramp. Well, if I could have anything, it would be for the green-skinned yet beautiful Queen of Mars to rescue me so she can learn more about this Earth thing called “lovemaking.
Andy Weir
Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.” He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. “Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule—meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.
Daniel Suarez
In all, his outfit required nearly two thousand man-years of research and development, eight barrels of oil, and sixteen patent and trademark infringement lawsuits. All so he could possess casual style. A style that, in logistical requirements, was comparable to fielding a nineteenth-century military brigade.But he looked good. Casual.
Daniel Suarez
Peace of mind is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.
Scott Hawkins
Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately reality has no advertising budget.
Daniel Suarez
Also, I'll lose half a liter of water per day to breathing until the humidity in the Hab reaches its maximum and water starts condensing on every surface. Then I'll be licking the walls. Yay.
Andy Weir
Hey,” Watney said over the radio, “I've got an idea.”“Of course you do,” Lewis said. “What do you got?”“I could find something sharp in here and poke a hole in the glove of my EVA suit. I could use the escaping air as a thruster and fly my way to you. The source of thrust would be on my arm, so I'd be able to direct it pretty easily.”“How does he come up with this shit?” Martinez interjected.“Hmm,” Lewis said. “Could you get 42 meters per second that way?”“No idea,” Watney said.“I can't see you having any control if you did that,” Lewis said. “You'd be eyeballing the intercept and using a thrust vector you can barely control.”“I admit it's fatally dangerous,” Watney said. “But consider this: I'd get to fly around like Iron Man.”“We'll keep working on ideas,” Lewis said.“Iron Man, Commander. Iron Man.
Andy Weir
Space is dangerous. It's what we do here. If you want to play it safe all the time, go join an insurance company.
Andy Weir
I stumbled up the hill back toward the Hab. As I crested the rise, I saw something that made me very happy and something that made me very sad: The Hab was intact (yay!) and the MAV was gone (boo!).
Andy Weir
Oftentimes in life, we can only determine our actions; not the outcome.
David P. Ingerson
Mars and my own stupidity keep trying to kill me.
Andy Weir
Innovation was a curious thing. It never failed to amaze him. And yet this place confirmed what they’d long known: that truly disruptive innovation rarely came from the expected sources. They’d had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it—and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions. No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed.
Daniel Suarez
One advantage of static factory methods is that, unlike constructors, they have names.
Joshua Bloch
A second advantage of static factory methods is that, unlike constructors, they are not required to create a new object each time they're invoked.
Joshua Bloch
Builder pattern is more verbose than the telescoping constructor pattern, so it should be used only if there are enough parameters, say, four or more.
Joshua Bloch
It is of course dangerous to set off an explosive device on a spacecraft.
Andy Weir
I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.
Linus Torvalds
Just three words? Nothing about his physical health? His equipment? His supplies?''You got me,' she said. 'He left a detailed status report. I just decided to lie for no reason.''Funny,' Venkat said. 'Be a smart-ass to a guy seven levels above you at your company. See how that works out.''Oh no,' Mindy said. 'I might lose my job as an interplanetary voyeur? I guess I'd have to use my master's degree for something else.''I remember when you were shy.''I'm space paparazzi now. The attitude comes with the job.
Andy Weir
The only real escape from hell is to conquer it.
Scott Hawkins
I must send you into exile, that you may be the coal of her heart. No real thing can be so perfect as memory, and she will need a perfect thing if she is to survive. She will warm herself on the memory of you when there is nothing else, and be sustained.
Scott Hawkins
Software will give you respect, but hardware will give you the Power.
Akshat Paul
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.
Tom DeMarco
Conclusion: I don't need the water reclaimer at all. I'll drink as needed and dump my waste outdoors. Yeah, that's right, Mars, I'm gonna piss and shit on you. That's what you get for trying to kill me all the time.
Andy Weir
The NSA?""Yeah, they called and offered to help out. Same software they use for enhancing spy satellite imagery."Venkat shrugged. "It's amazing how much red tape gets cut when everyone's rooting for one man to survive.
Andy Weir
When I was up there, stranded by myself, did I think I was going to die? Yes. Absolutely, and that’s what you need to know going in because it’s going to happen to you. This is space. It does not cooperate. At some point everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south and you’re going to say 'This is it. This is how I end.' Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math, you solve one problem. Then you solve the next one, and then the next and if you solve enough problems you get to come home.
Andy Weir
Carolyn – I need you to go back into America. We need an innocent heart. We will offer it to Nobununga when he arrives. Do you think you can handle that?”“An innocent heart? In America?” She hesitated.
Scott Hawkins
Diligence and hard work sensitize you to recognize opportunity.
David P. Ingerson
She wanted to burn the whole place to ashes but, at the same time, it would be kind of nice to see it again. Home.
Scott Hawkins
The next time someone gets on your nerves, remember your two choices: 1) share the problem; or 2) let them keep the problem to themselves.
David P. Ingerson
Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature's way of preparing us to face difficult realities.
Daniel Suarez
If you can't tell someone how to think, then you have to learn to manage the environment where they think.
Eric Schmidt
Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who "do not usually know what's supposed to be impossible.
Eric Schmidt
They hate you.""Why?""Cause you're a dick, Mitch.
Andy Weir
In other news, It’s seven sols till the harvest, and I still haven’t prepared. For starters, I need to make a hoe. Also, I need to make an outdoor shed for the potatoes. I can’t just pile them up outside. The next major storm would cause The Great Martian Potato Migration.
Andy Weir
I'm so close to Schiaparelli I can taste it. I guess it would taste like sand, mostly, but that's not the point.
Andy Weir
It's knowing one's ... limitations ... and then ignoring them.
Daniel Suarez
One word of caution—be careful how much you listen to the advice of others when in a deep pit of despair.
David P. Ingerson
You never understood games. Maybe that's why the world was such a mystery to you.
Daniel Suarez
When you fail, you can resist correction or cooperate in your recovery and future success.
David P. Ingerson
Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it.
Daniel Suarez
Are you a Buddhist?""No, I'm an asshole. But I keep trying.
Scott Hawkins
There is a mistake technical and scientific people make. We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn't true. If yoy want to change people's behavior, you need to touch their hearts, not just win the arguments. We call this the Oprah Winfrey rule.
Eric Schmidt
Listen to your customers, not your competitors.
Joel Spolsky
It's not technology that limits us. We're the limitation. Our technology is an expression of our intelligence and creativity, so the limitations of our technology are a reflection of our own limitations. We can't fundamentally advance technology until we fundamentally advance ourselves.
Christian Cantrell
... creative output depends on creative input.
Robert C. Martin